About the author

Lenka Požárová

Curriculum vitae

I was born in Brno in 1972. I will not dwell on a delicate childhood full of kid injuries but will skip right into adolescence. After high school study of economics and a year’s study of German at a language school, I could not miss out on a rare opportunity and I had a go at one more school, this time at a business academy in Austria. A short work experience was a terrific motivation for me to endure months of studying extra hard for math and so I successfully managed the entrance exam for business studies at the Faculty of Economics and Administration of the MasarykUniversity in Brno. Along with all this I was beating German into the heads of many students as an instructor at a private language school.

Afterwards, I worked for several years as a tax advisor in a large consulting company. Successes, a good salary, working through nights, stress, and health problems did not keep themselves waiting for long. So I summoned the courage for a difficult step in my life – I threw away the tough earned career and threw myself into turning my dreams to reality. I am starting off as an author and publisher of original and imaginative cookbooks and I am secretly weaving other plans.

I enjoy sports, dancing, and singing (especially when no one can see or hear me), traveling throughout distant lands, and especially cooking! I also very much enjoy attending the theater and hiking in the mountains with my husband. I am convinced that everything is possible; one just really must want to do it and one must summon all courage for it. Does it sound a bit too much like a fairy tale? I almost forgot: I like those very much as well.

On the birth of the cookbooks

My work was no longer bringing me satisfaction and was not returning new energy, which I was putting into it every which way possible. I began to feel that slowly but surely I was losing the passion for work, without which I simply cannot work. This was no week or month long delusion, this unsatisfying state had been lingering for more than a year. And don’t come to me saying that work can’t be fun! I’ve always longed to do work into which I’d be putting a piece of my heart. I believe that only this way of working can bring satisfaction to a person as well as joy to her and others.

I discovered that the only medicine is change, radical change. I will not hide anything, it wasn’t easy at all. Especially determining which new work direction I would like to take was a difficult task. I never had any fixed ideas from childhood about the one and only right job. Moreover, deeply rooted habits kept creeping up and asking: “And what else do I know how to do? Nothing! What will others think of me? Am I going to give up a career that’s going well just like that? What is it that’s actually missing in my life?”

I now know that all you need to think about is how you relax, what you like to do on the weekend when you have free time and you’re doing what you really want to be doing. I simply loved to cook and I was drowning in heaps of recipes, which I liked to sort and regularly re-arrange. When I would cook following a recipe, the result would be miles off the original thanks to my untamed fantasy. I just took the recipe as an inspiration, as a way of getting started. At the time, I wasn’t aware of my hidden talents at all. Arriving at a visit without a handmade pie was unthinkable for me. When spending time with friends, our conversations too often veered into the direction of exchanging culinary experiences and recipes. When abroad, I did not head for fashion shops, but I headed for grocery stores where I carefully walked around all shelves and studied local ingredients. In hotels I probably brought the cleaning women to the brink of madness when I emptied the inside of the minibar and stored at least some of my discoveries of the day in the cold.

Until one day I spent long hours stunned in one foreign bookshop in the cookbook section admiring their beauty and variety. Yes, that’s it! We will finally also have such beautiful cookbooks in our country! But doubts struck again. I can’t possibly manage to devise recipes; after all I am not a professional. After the first few tries I knew it would be OK. “What of it if I am not a master cook, at least people will be able to keep up with me and they will not dread overcomplicated creations”, I told myself. I wanted to create a cookbook that would be a feast for the eyes, with which it will be a joy to work and which will provide a few important instructions and some laughs as well. In addition, it will also challenge the reader to try his or her own fantasy. Maybe you would like to raise an objection at this point and say that there are many such cookbooks available. I’ll take the liberty of not agreeing. I really don’t know of any Czech, practical, beautiful, uncomplicated, and healthy cookbook.

Actually, at first I took the whole thing as a dream, and I played around with it in my thoughts. Basically I did what is usually done with dreams: keeping them at arm’s length. Then I received two pieces of advice. The first one was: “You should only dream about dreams because as soon as you begin fulfilling them you’ll have nothing left”. The other one was: “Dreams have a magical power; when you think about them a lot and you imagine them in detail, they’ll start to come true for you”. Without hesitation I chose the second advice and from that time I like to dream often and believe it (or not), my dream is gradually and in an unforced way becoming a reality.