Matching Tracksuits

The Girl decided that she wanted to help K make barszcz, that most perfect of all uses of the beet. We're meeting friends for a post-trick-or-treating party tomorrow night, and the hosts asked K to bring barszcz. What can I say -- she's a master. Everyone loves her barszcz -- both varieties.

The Girl peeled some of the beets before heading off for a bath then peeled some of the carrots afterward. They all simmered with parsnip, garlic, onions, and some herbs to make the stock that will form the basis of the soup.

"Since it's not a postny soup," she said, "I also threw in some smoked ribs." Which is to say, because it didn't have to be vegetarian because of Lent or Advent, she used a few of the ribs I smoked a few weeks ago.

The other request was for smalec. In a word, smalec means lard, but to call the dish that shares the same name simply "lard" is a gross injustice. "Lard" is for frying donuts and cutlets. Smalec is a little slice of heaven -- or perhaps a little glob of heaven, for it is essentially fat.

Fat with bacon bits, finely sliced (and sauteed in butter) onions, and slivers of apple (fried in the bacon drippings). At least that's the way K's mom taught her to make it. There are probably a thousand and one varieties, and truth be told, we've already begun experimenting: we took some of the meat from the ribs used in the barszcz stock and chopped it finely to mix in with the other ingredients for the smalec.

"Why not?" K shrugged when I suggested it. "It's all pork."

A friend invited me to join a social media group he's set up that focuses on food. His friends -- and he's got many -- have been posting the most amazing pictures of the most incredible things they've been cooking. It got me thinking today about what and how we eat.

I had a colleague who admitted to me that she and her husband almost never eat at home. "We go out every night because no one feels like cooking," she laughed. And I recall reading an article somewhere some ten or so years ago about apartments built without a kitchen with the assumption that the owner/renter would eat out every day. Such eating misses out on what's truly amazing about food, the creation process behind it. Often, for me, the preparation is just as enjoyable as the meal itself: having taken over Thanksgiving dinner for our family, I'm already beginning to think about what to cook. At the same time, though, I understand that that's probably the case only because I cook so infrequently.

For K, who does most of the cooking, I think it's not always quite as enjoyable, all the chopping and cutting and slicing and stirring. She often begins the cooking at night, after the kids have gone to bed, getting as much of it done before going to bed. Soups, for instance, are almost always completely done before she goes to bed. And while she does truly enjoy cooking (though perhaps baking a little more, I suspect), sometimes it can be just a drudgery for her.

That leads to the second half of my thoughts: the what. We rarely eat anything that could be called "processed." Sure, we use canned beans in chili most of the time, and we sometimes cheat with this or that, but it's usually what folks here in the south would call scratch cooking. K's soups always begin with a pot full of vegetables and a couple of pieces of meat. And in recent years, we haven't even bought sandwich meats all that much, preferring our own smoked meats to anything you can get in the store.

There's a joy in that as well -- the cutting of the wood, the preparation of the brine solution for marinating, the tending of the fire. It's another case of the process being as enjoyable as the product. It all takes time, a finite resource that's even scarcer when one figures the children into the equation. Yet what else is one going to spend the time doing? And besides, few things bring together a family as effectively as a good meal.

Perhaps a bonfire, with s'mores.

When I first arrived in Lipnica Wielka, I was shocked one morning at the small grocer's in front of the teachers' housing to see how much bread the women in front of me were buying. It solved a mystery, though. I'd discovered that if I arrived too late, sometimes simply in the mid-morning hours, there was no bread to be found.

"Nie ma" was the curt reply.

Standing in line that morning, though, seeing woman after woman buy two, three, sometimes four loaves of bread, I understood why. It wasn't until I saw the same woman buy the same amount the next day that I realized her family ate that much bread in a single day.

The loaves themselves looked like nothing I'd ever seen for sale in grocery stores. I knew you could get stuff like that -- hard and crusty on the outside, thick and hearty on the inside -- at bakeries and such specialty stores, but in a regular Food Lion or Kroger?

When K and I first moved to the States, finding a good source for good bread was of primary grocery-shopping importance. Who knew we had a source right there?