One of the (many) reasons I love living in Zürich is how we are in the center of Europe.  We drive thirty minutes north and we’re in Germany.  Spend just over an hour on the train heading northwest, and we get off in Alsace, France.  Head east for less than an hour and we’re in Austria.  Or go south two and a half hours and it’s pizza and pasta just over the Italian border.  Beyond the car and train, affordable flights make yet more cities an easy visit, even if just for the weekend.  That’s how we found ourselves in Rome, joining friends heading there from Paris.  It was a few days filled to the brim with history, culture and art, a nice dose of blue skies and sun, and countless scoops of gelato.

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What sunny, sweet days we have had !  March 20th was not only the first day of spring, but also the Jewish holiday of Purim and Macaron Day too (Jour du Macaron in France).  I enjoyed the obligatory sweets, meaning those 3-cornered cookies called hamantaschen for Purim, with mun (poppy seed), prune and apricot fillings… and I stopped by Ladurée here in Zürich‘s old town to mark the occasion with a salted butter caramel macaron.  (Or two.)

But the weekend saw lots of other sweets too, including more cookies. With a friend in town, I was even busier in the kitchen than usual, making a few batches of my favorite crunchy oat, seed and nut granola (with dark chocolate and sea salt).   Getting crumble topping ready to cover ramekins filled with frozen summer berries.  And preparing rolls of cookie dough to bake at a moment’s notice (chocolate chip pretzel cookies and Nutella oat cookies). You can only imagine my reaction when my friend showed up herself with an enormous box of bakery cookies from London’s Assal Patisserie, as well as Persian nougat (known as Gaz). It was NowRuz, the Persian New Year, she told me. And enjoying these sweets made with saffron, pistachios and rosewater was a must.  I was certainly not going to argue.

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“I would take the trolley car over the Brooklyn Bridge, get off at Essex Street and visit my grandmother on Eldridge Street.  She would put two pennies in a brown paper bag with a string on it, and drop it out of her window to me from the 3rd floor.   I’d take the bag and walk down the block to get a kasha knish.”

I love hearing stories told by my grandmother of her childhood in Brooklyn and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  The streets during those years have certainly transformed since then, with the growth of trendy neighborhoods, apartment buildings,  stylish stores, restaurants and bars.  But thankfully a few of the original food shops remain, including two on East Houston Street – Russ & Daughters Appetizers and Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery.  The latter is where my grandmother’s two pennies were always well spent.

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