Kicking it old-world

Lets talk heritage.

My dad's people are swiss. I grew up in the same predominantly swiss community that my dad did. In fact, saying that my dad's people are swiss is probably an understatement, they are very swiss. If you google "swiss cowboy" my dad's picture is one of the top image hits (see image provided by google on the right).

Swiss culture has been woven into my life since day one. The annual swiss parade/picnic, bi-annual swiss singing concerts, alphorns, polka music, yodeling, swiss kids camp and one of my personal favorites, brazelis.

In case you have never had the pleasure of eating one, brazelis are thin, waffle-like cookies that are traditionally flavored with lemon or anise. They are made in special irons that press the dough flat and stamp designs on them. My grandma makes them on holidays, but not exclusively. They taste amazing any time of the year.


As a wedding present, a few of my relatives pitched in and bought me and Peter our very own brazeli iron. Given that there are no remaining suppliers who will make the traditional irons with US plug-ins and the fact that the irons are expensive (even when you look at the figure in euros) this was no easy feat and Peter and I were very thankful. Over Thanksgiving weekend we decided to fire it up and take it for a test-drive.


There are two tricky things about having a brazeli iron with european plugs. First and most obvious, european plugs do not fit in US electrical outlets. Second, brazeli irons run off the kind of electricity ovens and clothing dryers use, not the paltry amount your average wall outlet puts out. Part of the gift included a converter, which solved both problems (hypothetically) but the plug-in situation was designed for US to Euro plugs, not the other way around.

After much debate, a good deal of which involved me talking my dad out of whacking elements off the iron's electrical cable, we settled on this solution.


It takes the one 16-pound converter (the big black box in the picture) plus three adapters to make it work. But it works :) Mom made the dough using an old family recipe and between Willow, Peter and I, we cooked up a whole batch.

And the old-world tradition lives on to another generation.