About This Site

The purpose of this site is to share my recipes, including my secrets and tricks to make them work dependably. As a research chemist and a scientist, I have additional insight into the physical and chemical processes occurring during mixing the ingredients, then cooking or baking them. I like to know not only how to prepare a specific dish, but also why specific steps are necessary parts of any recipe. Having said that, I must also say that I am not specifically a food chemist.

As the site name implies, I have a mentality of a Mad Scientist. What it really means is that I like to experiment with my cooking and do things that most chefs or home cooks wouldn’t think of. If successful, the results of such experiments will be included in my recipes, if not, well, I will know what not to do – this may be equally important.

I have a well equipped kitchen, and I try to use this equipment whenever it is more convenient and makes cooking easier or faster, without compromising the taste. I will indicate in my recipes which equipment I used. This does not mean that I consider it the best equipment on the market, but allows me to share tricks specific to a particular appliance or gadget, Also, almost everything that can be done with help of a modern kitchen appliance can be done manually or with a simpler version of such equipment. After all, earlier generations did it quite successfully. For example, I grind poppy seeds for poppy-seed rolls in a meat grinder attachment to my electrical stand mixer, but my mother used a hand cranked meat grinder, and it was ground in a special ceramic bowl, called makutra, with a wooden pestle for generations before. So you should still be able to follow my recipes adapting them to equipment you have or doing it by hand.
I am planning to create a post or page with details of my equipment, but this is still “under construction”.

Many of my recipes are based on my family recipes I have gathered over the years or on what my late wife and I created in our kitchen. As such they are often of Polish origin, but some other recipes are definitely not.

How to navigate this site

If you are looking for a specific recipe it is probably easiest to use the search capability of this site (click magnifying glass icon at the top of every page/post). This way you should be able to find the recipe you want, but also some other recipes and pages that just use the search term anywhere on the page.

I classified all recipes into two groups: cooking and baking, so you can start with one of appropriately named pages selectable at the top. You will get a listing of the recipes in the selected category.
If you are reading this on a smart phone, press on a Menu button at the top-right of the page (it looks like three horizontal lines). This may apply also to tablets..

I suggest that in between following the recipes (posts) you read also two other pages on this site: Units & Measurements, and General. They may answer some questions you may have.

Finally, if you would like to contact me please send me an email to [email protected]. A this time I did not activate comments on this site. I may do this in the future, once I figure out the legal privacy requirements related to it.