food and cooking | matching tracksuits

Barszcz in the Family

Wednesday 26 February 2014 | 0 Comments

What Polish family would be truly Polish if barszcz weren't a favorite? For as long as I can remember, the Girl has adored it, placed it almost at the very top of her favorite food list -- just below pizza, of course.

The Boy has been warming to the idea, and tonight, he decided it was time to get serious about beet root soup.

Somehow he managed to get two spoons, and he did make use of both of them.

That only left one family member: the cat. K, though, solved that problem today, taking a few seconds that L hadn't managed to finish, running them through a food processor to grind up the sausage (the poor old girl has lost almost all her teeth), and pouring the resulting purple mush into Bida's bowl.

And so now it's official: the Scott family, to a person/cat, loves beetroot soup.

Pickles and the Giant Slalom

Wednesday 19 February 2014 | 0 Comments

The Girl is odd when it comes to food, to say the least. It's tempting to say it's due to growing up in a half-Polish household where we cook a great deal of Polish food. That explains her absolute love of beet root soup, and it might explain why she's not wild about things like hamburgers. On the other hand, pizza is another favorite, to the dgree that when asked about favorite foods, sometimes she lists pizza, sometimes barszcz.

Snacking and treats seem fairly straight forward: she likes most of the things typical American kinds like. Chocolate. Apples. Ice cream. Pickles. A whole jar. With the juice poured into a cup and savored through a straw.

The Boy sees the pickles, squeals "Pickle!" and grabs one in each hand and almost gets away with them both before K catches him and lets him know that one is enough. The three of them curl up together and watch Ted Ligety work his magic in the giant slalom.

Greedy Belly

Thursday 06 February 2014 | 0 Comments

The Boy is a good eater. To say that is perhaps the ultimate understatement of our family. Sure, the Girl is theatrical; K is dedicated; Tata plays chess -- all of these are understatements, but they are gross exaggerations in comparison to "the Boy is a good eater."

All families, I guess, have the good eaters and the bad eaters. L leans toward the latter. True, she likes things most kids her age wouldn't touch (beetroot soup comes to mind) but she detests things that most kids her age adore (hamburgers and hot dogs come to mind). The Boy, on the other hand, will eat just about anything he sees us eating, and his favorites are some of the very items that L detests, like broccoli. This is often advantageous to them both, for she'll leave her three spears of broccoli on the plate for the very last minute, and occasionally the Boy, long done with his own dinner, will hop about for a while, roll about on his little four-wheeler, then abruptly jump up, dash to the table, and steal a broccoli spear.

Tonight, though, the Girl was with Nana and Papa for dinner, and the Boy had all the broccoli he could eat. He sat, holding each spear as if it were a lollipop, munching it down to the end, then simultaneously grabbing another and pointing to K's pile of green. He ate all of his and half of hers.

For his encore later this evening, he pulled a chair over to the counter by the stove and clamored up to grab one of the remaining crab cakes we'd had for dinner. It took him half an hour of playing then eating, playing then eating, but he ate almost the whole thing. When offered the final bite, he stood thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head. "Nah," he squeaked and ran to the living room to look for a mess to make.

Cheese Cake

Friday 27 December 2013 | 0 Comments

The Boy has discovered sernik, Polish-style cheese cake. And now we’re listening to Dexter Gordon’s “Cheese Cake” as accompaniment.

Transformations

Saturday 07 December 2013 | 0 Comments

Today was a day of transformations. We put an entire chicken, a bit of beef with the bone, two stalks of celery, a few carrots, some fresh parsley, sage, and thyme into a pot with water and let heat and time transform it into a deceptively clear stock. It had a yellowish tint to it, and there were globules of grease floating on the time, but by the time we'd poured it through a fine sieve several times, it looked like it should have little to no taste. Warmed water. And yet...

In the afternoon, we took a plain Fraser fir and transformed it into the magic of the season. Lights, baubles, ornaments, angels.

Babcia, L, and K put on some carols -- Frank Sinatra to begin with -- and hung gingerbread houses and hearts, beads, and lights, and I piddled about the yard. Sort of sad: it's always a highlight for me to decorate the tree, and I regret missing out on it. I always feel like a kid hanging the ornaments, sipping on something warm.

And in a way, I am a kid at it: only in the last few years could I stop saying, "I've celebrated Christmas so few times I could count them on my fingers." Yet not having participated in the holiday growing up makes it all the more meaningful for me now.

Yet early celebrations with K always lacked a little something. For me as a non-believer, Christmas was a season of pleasantries and friends, but little else. "If only people would be this nice to each other throughout the entire year," I would say, and that was about the extent of the spirituality of Christmas for me: a longing for a kind of utopia that I thought briefly and imperfectly existed during the Christmas season.

Having converted to Catholicism, though, adds a new meaning to Christmas. Properly speaking and on a most basic level, it adds new vocabulary: Advent, St. Stephen's Day, Vigil Mass. Of course there's more to it than just vocabulary, but I'm still a bit ill-at-ease to discuss it further. Old faithless comforts (or in this case, lack of comfort) disappear slowly.

So that particular transformation is still incomplete. The water is still boiling around me, still drawing out the essences, purifying. It's one more thing I'm waiting on in Advent.

The Day Before

Wednesday 27 November 2013 | 0 Comments

“I think it’s about time we take over the Thanksgiving dinner.” K and I were talking about what we would be doing this year, what plans we thought the Elders might have/desire. Christmas Eve had always been our responsibility, and the Elders sort of took Thanksgiving by default. But this year, we decided to charge, make plans, and cook dinner ourselves and invite the Elders as opposed to the opposite. More to the point, K always takes are of Christmas Eve (by and large), so I decided this year I would do the whole Thanksgiving dinner myself.

The morning’s weather might have seemed like an omen for the less convinced. Snow in late November, in South Carolina?

Before Thanksgiving? Yet the chill in the air somehow made the work go easier: a mental thing I guess. What else can you do but stay inside? What else can you do while inside but cook?

And so I started. First, the garnish: cranberry sauce with dried cherries and a few dried blueberries.

Butternut squash soup, freestyle. I looked at some recipes, but none of them had the I-don’t-know-what I was looking for. So I made my own recipe, which included leftover ricotta cheese and some curry powder.

By the time I was ready to move on to stuffing, the snow had stopped, the sky had cleared, and the dusting of white on the ground had disappeared, as had L’s excitement.

“If it keeps snowing today, and tomorrow, and maybe Saturday and Sunday, maybe we’ll be out of school Monday!” I thought that we might be lucky if the snow lasts until the afternoon, but I said nothing.

By then, I was busy with the dressing, using a recipe I’d found online that included the magic, attention-getting word: sausage.

Two casseroles popped into and out of the oven as well, and by the time we were putting the kids to bed, I’d started the final element for the day, the giblet gravy.

Tomorrow, the potatoes, the green beans with shallots and almonds, and something else. Seems I’m missing something. Oh well. Hopefully, we can live without whatever it is…