About me and my blogging motivations

Welcome to My Spicy Kitchen. My name is Zlamushka and I am here to serve you a bit of this and that, as long your mouth is spicy and cheeks are red :-)
I guess I should explain my primary motivation to set up this blog with a few cliché memories like: Ever since I was a little girl, I would spend summers at the little country house of my dearest grandma, who introduced me to the local herbs and spices and revealed to me the secrets of their preparation….

In fact, not only I never liked any spices at all (the traditional salt and pepper used to be already too much for my bland taste buds), but also I couldn't even get the instant noodle soup right. It was only after I went on a two-year scholarship to China, where I realized the painful truth: Either I start enjoying spicy food or I should stick with plain rice. My chilli aversion has all of a sudden turned into obsession (whoever said that chilli wasn't addictive was wrong..).

Now I am proud to admit that a meal without flavour to me sounds as appetizing as the idea of chewing on a parboiled cardboard.

So, what exactly are we dealing here with? Well, … Anything that’s hot, makes your heart beat, your forehead sweat and your butt hurt the morning after J But I would like to make a statement here :

THIS IS NOT A RECIPE BLOG !!! Recipes are my secondary concern and are only by-products of the genuine culinary experience – spice mixtures.

Every chef (at least the ones I know) would agree that the secret of a kitchen masterpiece lies in its sauce. Keeping this in mind, I decided to focus my attention on condiments :

• Pastes
• Curries
• Dips
• Marinades
• Pickles
• Glazes
• Sauces
  
• ... and other complicated ´ingredients’, so to speak.

I believe that having some of these friends in the fridge will turn your cooking into a 5 minute feast… Once you get the pattern, you can easily reduce your heaping collection of recipes to the absolute minimum, for my main concern is to free you from the life of instructions... (you are right, I myself own quite a bit of cookbooks, ... for inspirational purposes ?)...

In the following articles, I would like to share my personal collection of all different mixtures of spices (whether traditional or innovative), as well as give you an overview of how to use them (as in few illustrational recipes). All the condiments and recipes have been personally prepared by me and tasted by my favorite laboratory rats (my mum and sister, my dear fiancee and occasionally my dad (if they contain meat))... The pictures have been taken deliberatelly by me. I havent posted anything I wouldnt tried and liked myself.

I would love to hear your own experience with my assets, but please, do not forget to put on a white coat every now and then and immerse into your own kitchen laboratory experiments (and share them later with me here :)

Bon appetite,

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Ok, time to show off a bit :-)

1. November 2007 - My Harissa picture made it to the Cook It! software...


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2. July 2007 - Zlamushka´s Spicy Kitchen awarded as the :



3. March 2008 - Zlamushka´s Spicy Kitchen labelled as:



4. March 2008 - Zlamushka´s Spicy Kitchen received:



5. August 2007 - Zlamushka´s Spicy Kitchen was told that:



6. August 2007 - Zlamushka´s Spicy Kitchen got her very first compliment as: