The first recipes she learned to cook, simple peasant dishes like zurek sour soup and galabki cabbage rolls, remain her own favorites.
And she confesses she never imagined she would be a best-selling cookbook writer -- or release her own DVD.
"Really, I thought it would just be a kind of brochure," she says of her initial effort.
"My life hasn't really changed. Sometimes I have a little less time, but I make sure I have time for prayer -- it's the most important. The books are just secondary, really," she says.



