MPJ

It was commonly believed that ancient hunter-gatherers, both humans and Neanderthals, had a simple lifestyle in which most or all of their food was obtained by gathering from local sources or by hunting animals from their environment. We simply assumed that beside the meat they hunted, their diet consisted of only raw foods such as wild plants, edible insects, mushrooms, honey, or pretty much anything that was safe to eat. Well, according to the recent study performed by Ceren Kabukcu* and her team from the archaeobotanical department of the University of Liverpool, we couldn't be more wrong. Researchers analyzed charred food remains at two locations: the Shanidar Cave in Iraq and the Franchthi Cave in Greece. The food remains from the first cave originated from both Neanderthal hearths, 70,000 years old, and those from ancient humans thirty millennia later, and also those from Greece consumed some 12,000 years ago by our modern ancestors under microscopic examination reveal th...

The 'X' is definitely one of the most important letters in the alphabet. Not only that it is the most valuable variable in all math equations and scientific chase for the unknown, but in the entire history of human riddles, and I mean not always related to math, it always marks the most interesting spot. Sometimes the one with the treasure. It was no coincidence that the old Romans used it for the most important number of them all. 10. The very base of our widely used numeric system. But we are not here to talk about mathematics or treasure hunting per se. It will be more about age. Of ten. My son Viktor is turning this magic number on this year Earth Day (April 22nd), and I decided, in addition to our previous topic and post Interview With an Expert , to fire another set of questions for him to answer. This time more general and within various realms of life and... well, stuff... So let's start with favorites. I guess they say a lot about personality. And they don...

"Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around, facing her back into the house. - Let's go have dinner. Vincent said he made us that Serbian cevapcici." - Eureka, TV Show. Finally, and after almost five years from my first glimpse into the most famous Serbian dish, our cooking thread matured enough to step into the adventure of making the royalty. The well-known, most popular, and most amazing of all BBQs in these parts of the world. And by that, I mean many Balkan countries. If you are a resident here, you probably know what I am talking about. If not and you are just a traveler visiting Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and/or other neighboring countries and stumble to some restaurant with a grill and hesitate what to order, just say "ćevapćići' (pronounced 'chevapchichi') and you will experience one of a kind and one extraordinary dish. The quote from the beginning was from the sci-fi TV show "Eureka" that aired 2006-2012, and t...

Cooking can be hard. Sometimes it's more than art and pure joy, but if you add all the effort and 'sweat' into it, the very result never disappoints. It was just like that in our today's kitchen play. Making tacos only looks easy and cheerful, but if you are doing it for the first time... well, I will just say there were three hours of preparing, shopping, cooking, and filming that were all intense and on the edge of disaster, but we managed to go all the way through it, and at the end, our Saturday's lunch included these six 'extremely' edible tacos that vanished into tin air in a fraction of just a couple of minutes. Making tacos includes several parallel tasks, and one of them was watching the tortillas in the oven during their seven minutes of burning, and they should be monitored closely to avoid over-burning. The color of our lunch today might have gone a little more brownish than I was hoping for, but trust me, they were extra crunchy and deli...

There were lots of breakthroughs in human history until this date. Some were instant and recognisable events or technological inventions and some were slow evolutionary processes in history of our species. Whatever they were, the outcome was always reshaped course of mankind entirely. In our own time one of those is no doubt learning how to split the atom and very invention of nuclear bomb. We are still living in the post-turbulence time of that latest breakthrough that has potential to rise us from the Earth toward the stars. Some would say that it is still unknown whether this one is more of a civilization killer event or true entrance into another phase of humanity. We will wait and see. Either way, it is breakthrough, nevertheless. In early human history there was one similar invention that had the same uncertainty. It was called "Neolithic Revolution" and it happened in the middle of the Stone Age. And yes, even though we are still here, consequences of this invention ar...

Well, I am still not hundred percent convinced that this weblog matured enough for it's own cooking thread, but anyway, here we are again, after couple of months from original ' Little Chef ' post, we now have two more videos in our channel - our ways of making Sushi and Pizza. It all started couple of days ago, with me passing by one of those 'healthy food' stores in the neighborhood where I usually buy Serbian, sort of, non-carbonated ginger ale juice that is very popular in this part of the world - especially mixed with lemonade and ice cream. Anyhow, I stepped in to buy a bottle and noticed a pack of nori sheets on the shelf. I didn't think twice, so I bought one and today we made sushi for the first time in our culinary history. This is how it looks. Well, looked. It is always fun when you start preparing a dish for the first time. To be honest, in the past, on many occasions, our first endeavors ended in complete failure. However, today, sushi surp...