Jas Brechtl is a Bosnian expat who has been living in Northern Indiana since the summer of 1998, following a six-year exile in Germany. She is writer, cook, photographer, and an avid cheesecake lover.
Jas grew up in a traditional European family, the kind of family that sits together for big weekend lunches. Those lunches always began with some kind of soup. It isn’t a big lunch unless you begin it with a spoon.
Based on her blog now, you’d never know that as a child Jas barely ate. Food didn’t interest her in the least and actually disgusted her. She would eat enough just to survive, and even then it would be just a few things such as bread and soup….rather, broth. And there better not be anything floating in it or she wouldn’t touch it.
Jas suffered from anorexia throughout her childhood, but not because she had issues with her weight. It wasn't that she didn’t WANT to eat food, she just physically couldn’t. She never actually felt hungry.
This promptly changed when Jas became pregnant with her daughter. Today she believes that pregnancy hormones changed something within her body, which in turn affected her metabolism. Suddenly, she found herself ravenously hungry and loving everything. Soon after that, the war in Bosnia started, and now that she wanted to eat, there was no food. Everything was scarce, and meatless bean soup (grah) would be the family's only meal for many days in a row.
Still, Jas was changed. She vowed that once her family escaped the war, food would be her medicine. She started experimenting with flavors; her daughter was her guinea pig for many new creations.
The seed was planted and Jas's American Dream realized once she was able to pursue blogging full-time from home. Now her family finds Jas in the kitchen most of the day. It's her happy place and her escape.
There are so many dishes in other countries you would never try if you didn't travel. Traveling somewhere new opens your eyes and your taste buds to a whole new range of authentic flavor profiles and foods that you wouldn’t otherwise experience.
Jas believes the kitchen is a place where you can travel to any country without ever having to leave your house.