And of course I have my eyes closed…
Dinner
food and cooking
Tomorrow’s Surprise
Eighth-grade teachers are catering the monthly potluck we have at school.
I’m bringing zupa ogrokowa.
They’re not even ready for this…
Doughnuts
Baking
“I think I’m going to bake something: I haven’t baked anything for work in a long time,” K said after dinner. It seems to me a particularly Polish thing to do: bake something and take it to share with your colleagues. Perhaps it just seems that way because of my proximity to a Polish woman.
Tonight, though, she made muffins for everyone in her department.
What a lovely surprise they’ll have tomorrow morning.
End of Break Saturday
Today was the day everything went back to normal. The Christmas lights came down (though the tree is still up — whatever K wants to do is fine with me in that regard). The Boy’s 5v5 soccer season resumed: E’s team won 4:3, with the Boy scoring the winning goal.
But some things were still holiday-esque: I made farsz for pierogi again. And this time, I remembered how much grease the sautéed mushrooms spit out as they go through the grinder.
“Do we a fartuszek of any kind I can use?” I asked K.
“But of course…”
Saturday
Smoking Day 2024
Exactly one year earlier, it was a smoking day as well.
Sunday
Sunday Baking
Pierogi Party
Soup
Polish cuisine, in my experience, is centered around soups. I’m not a culinary expert or anything of the kind, so this is undoubtedly my personal preference coming to the fore: what has always caught my eye (and my tastebuds) in Polish cooking has been the soups.
Barszcz z uszkami is a treat beyond treats: we only have it once a year because the uszki are so time-consuming. It’s one of E’s favorites.
Żurek is such an odd-ball dish for Americans: soup made from a base of fermented rye flour? How weird. And how utterly delicious. It’s one of L’s favorites.
Ogorkowa? Pickle soup? “Get out!” was my first reaction. Who the hell makes soup out of pickles?! It’s absolutely perfect.
K likes most Polish soups, but she probably agrees with L and E that a simple rosół is the best. Babcia always makes it for us as our first dish in Poland, and a gentle, easy broth like that is the perfect thing after traveling.
And then there are the other: koperkowa, chłodnik, kapuśniak — the classics. But there are a couple of soups that stand above them all for me: flaczki (not because I love it so much — I do, but it’s not a favorite — but because I only get it in Poland: K absolutely is not a fan) and my hands-down favorite, kwaśnica. Not so much a Polish soup as a regional highlander soup.
We usually stick to soups in the winter and give them a break in the summer: having the stove on that long really warms up the house, and we want lighter meals in the summer. Except for rosół and koperkowa (none of us is really a chłodnik fan), the soups disappear.
Until the Girl asks K to fix that one soup — you know, with the potatoes and bacon bits.
And so we had for dinner a soup I have always thought of as a winter soup.
“We should do kwaśnica,” I will say some time in October or November.
“No, it’s not cold enough yet,” comes the reply.
But all our Girl has to do is ask for kwaśnica, and it can be 90 degrees outside, and K will not hesitate.
Saturday
I spent much of the morning working on school-related issues. My honors kids have turned in their first assignment (the famed/infamous 500-word introductory letter I assign the first day of school — “I didn’t know we’d have homework our first day,” some write), but it’s not for a grade (they don’t know that yet — I will apply it to extra credit later), so I read it as I would anything else: for information.
After lunch, which included (for me) a finely-sliced fresh habanero from a colleague at work, I started working to fix the pressure reduction valve that I had to take out a few weeks ago due to its leaking. I thought, “This should be a quick job. Just some Teflon tape to prevent leaks from the joint between the Shark Bite fitting and the valve itself…” but I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. It never is. Because the valve has 3/4 inch openings and our plumbing is 1/2 inch, I had to add a couple of couplings as well. And two of the four of the connections leaked when I put it all back together and turned on the water again. I turned off the water, pulled everything apart, and did it again, with more Teflon tape. The same thing. I tried a third time, putting an ungodly amount of tape. Finally, I got both of the leaks stopped and a third one started.
In the evening, when K and E went to mass to fulfill their Sunday obligation, I threw the bike on the rack and headed out for a quick loop at our favorite spot. It rained last night, but I didn’t quite realize how much.
Part of the boardwalk — K’s favorite part of the ride — washed out.
While I was gone, though, the Girl decided to bake. And my goodness, did she ever bake. Cupcakes topped with raspberry choclate ganache.
Dinner
The Girl has decided she needs to be cooking more, to learn how to cook more than mac and cheese and quesadillas. She’s done chicken alfredo a couple of times, but when K asked L to cook dinner tonight and suggested she just make the tried-and-true chicken alfredo, the Girl demurred. She wanted to try something new. Something different.
Something Asian.
Long, long ago, when K and I were dating, she wanted to do the same thing — try something new, something different. She decided on something decidedly non-Polish, something from southern Europe. She chose lasagna.
Mother and daughter both chose pasta. They both had similar issues with the pasta. And in both cases, those they cooked for ate the dish with enthusiasm.
Saturday
K spoils us — she really does. We all get up to freshly made racuchy topped with homemade blueberry preserves. Why? Because we asked for it? No — because K just wanted to do something nice for us.
In return, L trimmed some of the hedges at the side of the house. To be honest, it wasn’t really in return: K asked her, and L obliged. I’m not even sure she had any of the racuchy because got up late and ended up going out for lunch with her friend.
“But I’ll gobble them up later,” she assured me.
They’re still in the fridge.
Still, the Girl did the trimming, and even put aside her teenager I-know-everything-why-in-the-world-are-you-explaining-this-ness and let K walk her through what she wanted.
In the afteroon, Ciocia M came for a visit (her girls — L’s and E’s cousins for all intents and purposes — are still in Polska) and we went for a walk in our favorite park.
A lovely day, in other words.
In the evening, we watch some replays of Olympic events — beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, the individual time trial, and some tennis.
Jam
This is the time of year we feel like we’re drowning in blueberries. We head out each day and pick berries, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a not-so-few minutes. Today, for example, I picked for about an hour; K joined me for about half an hour, and she was not even picking in a new spot of the bushes: she was going back over where I’d been, grabbing the berries I’d overlooked because they were hiding.
And the rest of the time? K was making the first batch of jam for the year.
Spilled Kasza
That we even have it is a sign…
Kluski Śląskie
Smoking Day
Making Cookies
December Friday
Today was our annual trip to the district’s vocational school to give our soon-to-be-high-schoolers an overview of what’s available to them there: everything from cosmetology to firefighting, from diesel engine repair to culinary arts, from mechatronics to nail tech. It’s quite an impressive variety.
Once I got back home, I saw that the inevitable has begun: our poor widowed neighbor has moved out of her house and family and friends have already started on the house — they took down the back deck that looked to be made of nothing but rotten boards.
“Wonder what kind of neighbors we’ll get,” will become a common topic of discussion, I’m sure — not that we have any say in the matter.
For dinner, Babcia made placki ziemniaczane with mushroom sauce — utter heaven.
And after dinner, a walk with the dog while the rest of the family went to church, a walk that included a street I haven’t been on in ages. I’d forgotten about the holiday scene they create.
