Last night my family and I had dinner with our longtime friend Marketa Luskacova in her apartment in Prague. She made us some traditional czech fruit dumplings (we had plum, apricot and cherry). I have only had them once before in my life–another time when Marketa made them–and they were delicious. Marketa was kind enough to share the recipe with me. I think I’ll take a stab at making them next summer when fruit comes into season. Marketa’s recipe is below and I found another recipe czech dumplings on-line here.

Mix:

1 cup rough ground white wheat flour or refined flour mixed with semolina
2 cups ricotta cheese
1 egg
pinch of salt

Let the dough rest for at least one hour.

Then, a piece at a time, pinch off an inch diameter ball of dough, flatten and wrap around the fruit. The dough should be very thin around the fruit. If you are using apricots, plums or cherries keep the stones (pits) in the fruit (other popular fruits are strawberries or apples cut into quarters)*. As you form the dumplings make sure your hands and the dough are both well covered in flour. Otherwise the dumplings will stick.

Immediately before serving boil the dumplings for about six minutes. Apricot and plum dumplings require slightly longer to cook. The dumplings will be ready when they float and the water returns to a boil.

Serve with melted butter, sugar, ground poppy seeds, bread crumbs, dry farmers cheese and sour cream.

*An alternative version requires pitting the fruit before forming the dumplings. When this is done a sugar cube is put in the place of the pit. Cherry dumplings are made three cherries to a dumpling.

There are a few places in the world that seem to inhabit their own realities and only occasionally bump up against ours. One of these is the toy shop Kristin Baybars in London. I have been going there since I was a child. Summers my parents would rent a flat around the corner and I would spend as much time as I could at the shop. There was a little table with toys and magic tricks available for pence. The rest of the shop consisted of handmade dolls, items for dollhouses and other pieces of art masquerading as toys. To this day there remains in the shop the most beautiful hand carved rocking horse I’ve ever seen. All grey and speckled it is far beyond the reach of any child and most any parent. My father will, occasion, wax eloquently on the horse’s beauty.

There are two things that make the shop magic, the proprietor and the toys themselves. Kristin has some sort of unique insight into the minds of children. I remember that she would entertain me with all sorts of little magic tricks, riddles, stories and jokes for what seemed like hours. My parents would have to drag me out of the shop.

Kristin’s insight into children allows her to help you pick out the perfect toy. I was reminded of this when we visited her shop last week. After we bought Asa a lovely toy train she suggested a five piece wooden game which he’s since derived endless hours of shrieking delight. I can’t say I have seen a toy like it before or that it would have ever occurred to me to buy it with Kristin suggesting it to us. That seems like magic to me.

I found an interview with Kristin in The Observer in which she sums up her philosophy of shopkeeping: "There are things I’ve had on shelves for 35 years and businessmen will tell me that that’s nonsensical, that an item needs to sell five times in a year or your money’s better in a bank. But if the money was in the bank those things wouldn’t be here for the right discerning person to eventually come along and acquire. And for me to love in the meantime." The complete interview is available here.

Last week I witnessed dawn from inside Stonehenge. As the sun rose I was able to stand inside the stones and watch light progress across the ancient slabs. The colors changed quickly. Just before first light the stones were tinted and pocked blue grey. As the sun broke the rock shifted to rose flecked with pink, white and yellow. Then once the sun was fully in the sky the stones turned to grey.

Watching the light play across the stones I could easily imagine a pagan ritual 2000 years beforehand. I also thought about how long things can stay sacred space. Stonehenge has been a sacred site of some sort on and off for almost ten thousand years. It has changed a great deal during that time and been used by many different cultures. Sometimes it has fallen into disrepair and mostly forgotten and sometimes it has been lovingly maintained, preserved or even expanded. Yet its existence stretches back before the beginning of recorded human history. It is difficult for me to imagine than many structures built today will continue to be in use 10,000 years from now.

One of the great things about London is all of the amazing pocket parks. Within a block or two of our flat there are at least of them. The most interesting of these is, without a doubt, the Calthorpe Project. From what I gather the park was created in the late 1980s when a group of local citizens stopped a fancy condo project and put in a ramshackle maze of a space complete with an outdoor performance area, rundown soccer field, inward directed looping zen like footpaths and community gardens. It is lovingly maintained by some local group and has none of squalor I associate with people’s parks in the United States. It is open to all and upon entering I experience an almost complete disassociation with the surrounding city. It is not that I am transported to the countryside exactly more that I enter some place sort of timeless. The whole experience reminds me of all the stories about entering fairy realms. They are supposed to be right there beyond a door in the wall. The Calthorpe Project makes me think that perhaps they are…

I am spending a few weeks this summer traveling throughout Europe. My family and I are visiting London, Paris, Prague, Oban and Edinburgh. We are in London right now and our flat is quite close to the British Museum and I have been to visit it a couple of times in the last week. The museum has one of the most impressive and important collections in the world. The collection is, among some circles, also quite controversial. The heart of the controversy is over the question: to whom does culture belong? Does it belong to a particular nation state? Does it belong to all of humanity? Does it belong to the descendants of particular ethnic group?

One of the sets of artifacts at the museum that is most contested is the Parthenon sculptures. The British Museum’s Trustees claim that it belongs to them because it was salvaged by Lord Elgin during the Ottoman Empire and removed to Britain with the permission of the Empire. The Greeks (i.e. the current Greek government) claim it belongs to them and should be returned to Greece because it is part of their heritage. The British Museum’s Trustees counter that the statues are part of the world’s heritage and that the museum is the best place for the world to come and see them since it gets a massive number of visitors. 

It all seems very complicated to me. Who has the greater claim? I’d venture the Greeks but I am sure plenty of people would disagree with me…