Hello, followers of my great dad's great blog about great food. I'm Ken's youngest daughter, Noele, and I'm spending the semester abroad in Prague. As you may have gleaned from my dad's post about knedliky and smazeny syr (Czech bread dumplings and fried cheese), Prague is not exactly the culinary capitol of the world. However, there is one restaurant that we've found that we love going to.
Bohemia Bagels is a quirky Bagel joint with three locations throughout Prague
: Holešovice (the neighborhood I live in), Malá strana ("Lesser Town," just across the Charles Bridge), and Old Town (close to the NYU class buildings as well as the main city center of Prague). This place serves a great array of sandwiches (served on bagels), salads, soups, and entrees, but my friends and I usually go for brunch on Sunday mornings. NYU students have a sort of religious obsession with sunday brunch.
If you're planning on travelling to Prague any time soon, I would definitely recommend going to this place for breakfast, especially if you're sick of beer cheese soup and pork knee with gravy, which I can almost guarantee you will be. You won't find traditional Czech cuisine there, but if you have a sturdy head on your shoulders this should come as quite a relief. There's a high contingency of British ex pats who work there (at least at the Holešovice location), so language is not usually a problem, but the restaurant is not excessively touristy.
Bohemia Bagels has quite a bit in way quirky ambiance. The picture to the left is the view looking into the bar from the main dining room. Interestingly enough, this section is also the "smoking section." Yup, that still exists. I think I was maybe eight years old max the last time I was asked "smoking or non-smoking?" But while in the United States indoor smoking has become a distant piece of folklore, it is very much alive in Prague.
Below is a picture of my friends at our regular Sunday table in the main dining room, getting ready to feast.
Every single week, I get the same thing: an egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel and a bottle of orange juice. What kind of bagel the sandwich arrives on is usually sort of a game of Russian Roulette, but this week I wised up and specified that I wanted an everything bagel. That sandwich is sustaining my toiling fingers as they type these words. Here's how awesome my breakfast looks:
Three of my friends got the eggs benedict, which we basically all agree is the best thing ever, or at least the best thing on the Bohemia Bagels brunch menu. Like regular eggs benedict, Bohemia Bagels serves up two poached eggs with hollandaise sauce over thick cut bacon. The thing that makes this dish special, though, is that in lieu of english muffins (which nobody really likes anyways), they serve the eggs, hollandaise, and bacon over lump crab cakes. All of this is paired with a little arugula salad, potato hash and a mini bagel. I can hear my mom and dad drooling from four thousand miles away.
Another one of my friends got the "Charles IV," which is a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a mini bagel, bacon, sausage, and two eggs. We're not exactly sure why this particular breakfast is named after Charles IV, but people in the Czech Republic are just generally obsessed with this guy, so it wasn't a huge shock. She looks extremely overwhelmed/joyed in the picture below, and for good reason. There was no way this delicious meal could be finished by one person, but we did our best to help her out. You're welcome, Olivia.
My friend Katie got "The Full Monte," which is comprised of an omelet, two sausages, bacon, baked beans with ham, mushrooms, a mini bagel, and roasted tomatoes. She seemed pretty happy, judging from how much was left on the plate about an hour later. Which was nothing. Another upside of Bohemia Bagels that my caffeine fiending New Yorker friends really appreciate is that they serve bottomless American drip coffee, which is actually extremely hard to find in the Czech Republic and in most places in Europe. What you usually have to get is an Americano, which is basically a shot of espresso diluted with water. We serve these at the ice cream store I work at in Lexington, MA (Rancatore's Ice Cream and Yogurt) as well in lieu of drip coffee, and as a non-coffee drinker I always thought they two were exactly the same. However, Katie informed me that drip coffee is actually more highly caffeinated than an Americano because the water has more prolonged contact with the caffeinated coffee beans.
If you're not looking to have eggs, there are still options for you here. My friend Ellen got the tofu breakfast wrap, which is essentially curried tofu and vegetables in a wrap served with french fries and a small salad.
We absolutely adore Bohemian Bagels, and we think they adore us too. If you want to know more about my travels, follow my blog "Dear Julie," at http://dearjulieprague.blogspot.com/. Thanks for reading!
-Guest blogger Noele
In addition to the apple crisp Gail made for dessert, our guests brought these flavored rice candies from his recent business trip to Japan. The rice candies are jellied. The green ones tasted like tea. The black and brown ones were covered with sesame seeds and filled with bean paste. Each is delicate and lightly sweet, a fun treat.
After the farmer's market, Gail and I stopped for lunch at Gustazo Cuban Cafe in Belmont. Gail had a Cuban sandwich. She loves Cuban sandwiches and this was a good specimen. She would have preferred that the pork was sliced rather than pulled so it didn't fall apart as much.
Dunkin' Donuts Pumpkin Latte: $3.19 for a small with a doughnut. We got it without sugar added, and added one pack of sugar on our own. It had a light pumpkin flavor, and started out with the right level of sweetness. After a while, it seems like syrup at the bottom of the cup mixed in, because it became far sweeter, beyond what I liked. If you have one, stir it well before adding more sugar. The other oddity was that nobody steamed any milk while making it. Despite the steamed milk coming out of a machine, it was thick enough to hold up a stirrer.
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte: $4.01 for a small. We didn't add sugar this time. It was still very sweet for me. Gail said it tasted like pumpkin pie, which I thought was a good thing. Gail doesn't like pumpkin pie. The pumpkin and cinnamon was very pronounced in this drink.
Peet's Coffee Pumpkin Latte: $3:75 for a small. Once again, we didn't add sugar, and this one was not nearly as sweet as the other two. The Peet's latte had a cardamom flavor that Gail didn't like. I liked this one best, but I think it was mostly because the sweetness was lower. Even though this was my favorite, I don't think I would get another pumpkin latte. They were all just too much for me. Peet's gets an extra shout out because we were served by one of our favorite neighborhood teens.
Fish Tacos
First we made the knedliky, a boiled dumpling that incorporates stale bread. The most interesting difference in this recipe from other dumplings we've made is that the dough is whipped until the gluten is worked up.
You ball up the dough and boil the heck out of it. We made three-eighths of a recipe to use a single egg, so we may have over-cooked it a bit. Not that it would make much difference. The result was a dry, compact, bread-like dumpling, which you slice and cover with a cabbage and bacon mixture.
This is traditionally served with roast pork, and since we skipped that, we used a bunch more bacon in ours. It came out as a hearty dish, which didn't need the pork. If you serve it with pork, a much smaller portion of the knedlicky and cabbage would do.
Smazney Syr is szimply fried cheese. It's made with Edam cheese, and typically served with tartar sauce. Noele reported a rubbery, bland dish. We think she must have gotten cold cheese, because ours was gooey and delicious. We cooked it longer than the recipe said to, the cheese oozing out of the sides. Noele, try cooking this yourself. I think you will like it.
There were two must-buy snacks at Wilson's today. The first was Wilson's own cranberry hot pepper jelly. This is a taste test for the upcoming Austin to Boston blogger food swap: Cranberries for the Massachusetts product, Wilson's for the ultimate in local, and hot peppers just for the oddity. Served simply on a Ritz, the jelly was a great sweet and spicy treat. It wasn't overly sweet, letting the cranberry tartness through; a very Asian flavor.
The second must-buy snack was Long Island oysters, which they had on special. I need to get better at opening the little rats, but once done they were sweet, fresh and salty. I served them with a dash of pepper sauce and a squeeze of fresh lemon. They were very good like this, as usual.
Rockin' prides themselves on their cupcakes, though. You can see in their picture how they get a balance of frosting and cake while still getting the beautiful, high-topping of frosting. First, they cut a divot out of the middle of the cake and fill the hole with frosting.
This is the classic seaside fudge and candy shop, and they make their fudge right on the premises. We know this for sure because we were fortunate enough to watch as they were cooling and texturing a batch of fudge. The candy maker scrapes the hot fudge off the edge of the big copper pot, occasionally lifting the big spoon in the air and pouring it back into the pot.
Start with a whole boiled lobster. They are hot, and there are spiny parts, so be careful not to burn or poke yourself.
Turn over the lobster and locate the joints where the claw arms attach to the body.
Twist the arm joints to pull them off the body.
Now twist the claw off the two piece arm parts. These are called the knuckles.
Break the two knuckles apart. You may find that the meat from one knuckle comes out when you pull them apart. That makes it easier!
You make be able to get the meat out the knuckles with a lobster fork or pick or sometimes even your pinky. The only difference between a fork and a pick, is the fork has two tines and the pick just one. If those don't work, you will need to crack the knuckle shell with a lobster cracker.
Now to the claw. First break off the small portion of the claw. Do this over the shell bowl to catch the water that will gush out of the bottom of the claw shell.
You may get lucky and the small claw meat pulls right out. Otherwise, you can use your pick.
To get to the meat in the claw you are going to need to crack open the bottom of the claw shell.
The meat should pull right out of the shell once it is cracked. You can eat that white stuff. Think of it as lobster aspic.
Now we move to the tail meat. The first step is to locate the spot on the belly where the tail attaches to the body. You first need to pierce that spot with your fork. It doesn't have to be a big hole.
Then you are going to bend the tail and body backwards until they tear apart. Do this over the shell bowl to catch the water that will come out when they separate. The green stuff is the liver, or tomalley. You can eat this, but most people don't.
Now locate the joints on the fan at the tip of the tail. There are five of them.
You want to twist them to pull them off the tip of the tail.
This is the tricky part. To get the meat out of the tail you are going to push it out of the tail shell with your thumb. Put your thumb in the tip end where you just removed the fan tail parts. While you push, it helps to straighten out the tail. If the tail meat is stubborn, you may need to break the belly side of the shell at the wide end.
There is a strip of meat along the back of the tail that you should peel off. That will expose a thin dark line, and possibly a clump of red-orange stuff. Clean off the dark line. It's ... well, let's just say you don't want to eat that. The red clump is lobster eggs. You can eat that, but most people don't. You can cut the hunk of tail meat into bite-sized pieces and eat the whole thing.
Now for the advanced picking. There is meat in each of those small legs along the belly of the body section. Some people say this is the sweetest meat in the lobster. They are probably just justifying why they go through all the effort to get to it. You can break off each of these legs at the body.
Then rip them into as small a section as you need to get to the meat inside. You can often suck on them like a straw to get the meat out. Sometimes you might need to chew on them a bit to force the meat out.
Next, pull the body shell off the inside of the body. You may find more tomalley in there, which you can eat if you like.
If you turn the inside of the body upside down and flatten it out, it should crack along the line where the little legs used to be attached. I outlined the area in the picture. There is meat all along that crack, but it looks just the same as the gills. You can't eat those gills. They don't have any flavor, but they have a funky, cloth-like texture. The meat there is seldom worth the effort.
That's all the meat there is. You could boil the shells to make a base for lobster bisque if people didn't suck on the shells while picking them. When you are done, double wrap the shells in plastic bags before throwing them out. They can really stink after a day or two in the trash.
