Nazdar, I’m Wendell. I love to cook but I am not a chef. I hope you will enjoy my silly little hobby website where I share my recipes with you.
A little bit about me
My maternal great grandparents were both born in 1887 in the Czech Republic. They were married in 1910 before immigrating to the United States shortly thereafter. During their multi-year migration to the western United States, they had 4 children — the last one was my grandmother.
I grew up watching grandma and her sisters make many Czechoslovakian dishes, baked goods, and desserts. Of course, my mom also learned from our family, so I enjoyed many delicious Czech meals and treats that I’ll never forget. Some of the most fondly remembered are the fried pork chops, roasted chicken and rice, and pekotch (a crispy Czech cracker). My grandma and her sisters used to literally fill garbage bags with pekotch for Christmas gifts because we all loved it so much.
My other grandma was from Arkansas. She was an amazing cook of Southern-style foods, and she liked to can her own fruits and vegetables. Everyone admired her kitchen abilities, but the most notable items were her fluffy dinner rolls and magical strawberry jam. There were many other favorites, but these stood out the most. When I was in high school, class was just down the street from her house, so I would often visit for lunch. Of course, I would help her and I learned a lot about her style of cooking.
At 9 years old, my mom divorced my biological father. When I was 10, she started dating a Mexican police sergeant, who eventually became my stepfather. His parents were indigenous to Mexico but immigrated to the United States when he was only a few years old. My mom learned how to cook more Mexican dishes, partially from her mother-in-law’s influence but also from her own research.
Fast-forward a decade or so and I started to become interested in cooking the very meals that my grandparents, mom and step grandmother used to cook. But they didn’t have any recipes written down! So, I started paying more attention — I began writing down ingredients lists, then asking for quantity and time estimates as they went along. Amazingly, I have been able to create many dishes that taste just like the old family recipes.
In 1993, I met my Sicilian wife. Her grandparents immigrated from Sicily to New York, where they started an Italian restaurant in the old part of Buffalo. They lived upstairs, so my wife’s mom, aunts and uncles all learned the Sicilian style of cooking. They actually had written recipes, and my wife is the beneficiary of them all. She likes to brew a pot of her family’s famous sauce and meatballs for special occasions. Of course, you can imagine the impact this has had in my own cooking — I often try to live up to her family’s heritage by preparing mostly authentic Italian dishes.
Today, there aren’t many surviving family members among those mentioned above. My mom still likes to cook, and I still like to assist while taking notes. We visit my wife’s family in Buffalo occasionally, so I get little tips and tricks here and there. I’m still learning and will continue to offer the results here at Czech-Mex Kitchen. Enjoy!
About this website
This website started out as a personal project where I could store my recipes and refer to them myself. The idea was that I could simply browse the recipes from my phone while in the kitchen. This would allow me to (eventually) rid myself of the crazy, unorganized folder full of hand-written recipes. The website allowed me to easily categorize recipes and find them when needed.
Sometimes I would share photos of the dishes I prepared on social media, which would then prompt my friends and family to ask for the recipes. At first, I’d just copy and paste them into a reply, but those are easily missed or lost in the process. At some point, I decided that this website should be presentable enough to share those recipes directly. So here we are.
Over the years, it has undergone various renovations and name changes before settling on Czech-Mex Kitchen. There’s still work to do to make it more usable in the kitchen, but I think it’s pretty decent despite missing a few nice-to-haves.
A quick note about spelling
The eagle-eyed Czechs amongst you might notice my odd spellings in Czech recipes. My mom and I never saw how things were spelled — we just heard our family talking about them. They hadn’t written the words in so long, they forgot most of them. So, we came up with our own spellings based on how they sound. Here are some examples:
- Pekotch (pronounced peck-otch): a crispy cracker made with sauerkraut
- Jmolke (pronounced juh-mole-kay): a clear chicken soup with small dough bumps
- Geddeck (pronounced jed-eck): an old man — what gramma used to call grampa
- Pburrhundt (pronounced buhrrrrr-hunt): a brat — what gramma used to lovingly call me