food and cooking
Old and Young
There are times when the Girl most decided looks older than her actual age: riding her bike in the carport the other day was such a time; at the beach this summer was another. Yet looking older and being older are two different things. Indeed, looking older, acting older, and being older are three different things. Two of those three are out of anyone’s control. Acting older is a function of biology (brains and bodies must develop, after all), psyschology, and lastly, choice.
I try to influence that choice by increased reference to the Boy. “When Little Brother is here,” I’ll begin when I sense some fussing is approaching, “will you really want to act like such a little child? Don’t you want to be big sister?” Perhaps a bit manipulative, but isn’t that the case with most aspects of child rearing at this age? Manipulation will only get me so far in the game, though. The rest is her choice.
Tonight’s choice: to cook dinner. It’s a lazy, almost-emergency-nothing-planned dinner: we have a jar of spaghetti sauce and some noodles in the cabinets for such evenings. Perfect for a little girl.
“You’ll do the hot stuff, Tata,” she explains. “I’ll crush the sugar for the noodles and other stuff.” (I can never get “bullion” into her head; it’s always “sugar.”) She pours the jar of sauce into the pan, swirls around the water in the jar to rinse off the leftover sauce, cleans off the table — everything she can do, she does.
These are the small accomplishments that instill intense pride. “When Little Brother is five or six, he can help, too,” she says offhandedly as she crushes bullion cubes. “Guess what, Mama!” she almost yells when K walks through the door, “I cooked dinner!”
And so the future unfurls itself slowly in front of us. We watch and smile, anticipating and almost dreading: we’ll look back wistfully on these blog entries some day, we know.
But this is only half of the story.
As surely as she shows flashes of the years to come, the Girl reminds us that she’s still five. “Want to see how I can jump like a frog?” she asks after dinner.
If only she can keep this balance of youthful excitement over the most seemingly insignificant things and an increasing sense of responsibility, I’m quite certain of her future.
Saint Stephen’s Day 2011
For us, the holidays are a time of Wigilia leftovers. We’ve begun our lunch two days in a row now with barszcz z uszkami. The Girl likes her barszcz without the “ears,” (i.e., dumplings), though. For sane people, it’s the wild-mushroom-filled dumplings that elevate the dish to perfection, but the fact that L loves barszcz is enough.
It’s not the barszcz she’s used to, though. This is peppery, clear barszcz, made with fermented beet juice to give it an edge. The result is a testament to the Girl’s love of the soup: it’s peppery enough that afterward, she fusses about how her throat burns, and she eats it knowing this is coming.
After lunch, I pack her small bike and helmet in the trunk, and we head for our favorite park, leaving K at home to rest and enjoy some quiet. L quickly makes friends with a young Latino girl her age who is also on a bike, and the two spend the next ninety minutes together, playing games, comparing notes about second-language abilities, and being five-year-olds.
Later, when L and K are both in bed, I occupy myself with old pictures. I look through the pictures of our wedding in 2004, pictures I’ve seen dozens of times, then move to pictures from the day after: a small garden party, family and friends relaxing in a surprisingly warm day in my in-laws’ yard.
I drift into thoughts about how different this life is from that, and how similar.
Gnostic Preparation
What happens if the one individual who truly knows how to cook the traditional Christmas Eve meals doesn’t feel like doing much more than resting through her cold?
To begin with, she drinks folk remedies like egg yolks in hot milk — eggnog base, I guess — and a syrup of honey and garlic that produces breath foul enough to stop a charging rhino. (It’s sweet, though, and the Girl loves it: she takes a bit every night, and it truly helps ward off colds. But the best part for her is running around and breathing on everyone. Probably the fact that, in a fit of hyperbolic play, I fell down dramatically in the middle of the kitchen floor afterward helped encourage the game.)
It also means that the Polish-ized American husband gets his first shot and cooking barszcz from scratch.
This starts by making an beet-based vegetable stock from:
- three carrots,
- three beets,
- two celery stalks,
- two parsnips,
- half an onion,
- half a dozen cloves of garlic,
- two prunes, and
- one apple.
Cubed into large chunks, it all goes into a pot of water to boil, then simmer for two hours. Once everything has cooked soft, pour it through a strainer and all that’s left is a glistening, purple beet stock that has a sweet aftertaste and is ready to the final seasoning (which includes the addition of fermented beet juice) to turn it into barszcz.
As I strain it, I find myself thinking that perhaps this is the perfect food for gnostics. After all, if it’s the spirit — the essence — of a thing that has any value, as gnostics believed (and still believe), and the physical body itself is useless, what better food to illustrate that than a soup stock that ends with clarified, pure flavor and a steaming pile of now-refuse, vegetable bodies that once carried the essence of flavor but now, limp and colorless, are good only to be tossed in the compost?
Foolish thoughts, these ruminations of the theology of food: I have other things to worry about, like creating some kind of stuffing for the salmon fillets that will be tonight’s main course. With my usual on-the-fly cooking methods, I end up with sauted crab meat with crushed roasted garlic, capers, and walnuts with a light sprinkling of tarragon and ginger and a squirt of fresh lemon juice just before turning off the heat: a whole slew of flavors that will also be paired with smoked oysters and slivers of roasted garlic before being tucked into a sliced salmon, because Gnostic denial of the senses has no place in the Christmas Eve kitchen.
Christmas 2011 Baking
A day that starts like this — sunny and warm after a cold, cloudy day before — begs to be played in (and have passive voice sentences written in). We need to visit a park, go for a walk, play in the sun.
But it’s baking day, and the Girl has been waiting anxiously — pesteringly, one might even say — for this day because she gets to use her fabulous new holiday-themed cookie cutter set. After a quick lesson, she’s ready to go.
Soon we have candy canes, Christmas trees, gingerbread men (though cut from sugar cookie dough), and stockings ready for the oven.
All we need are a few sprinkles of decorative mystery color that the Girl picked out, filled with uncontrollable excitement, during a trip to the market yesterday.
The adult versions get a coating of frosting lemony frosting and a sprinkle of roasted pistachios. A cheese cake in the afternoon and the year’s modest holiday baking is complete.
Rainy Holidays
We wake to a gray, foggy, and rainy morning, a day that promises only to compound the misery of trying to do anything in town. It's the kind of day that one wants to stay inside, cuddle up,
and watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker.
It's almost ninety minutes of dancing, with only limited, very sporadic narration, yet the Girl sits, fascinated. "When is the Sugar Plum Fairy coming?" she asks, over and over and over, with it often coming out as "Sugar Flum Pairy."
Yet it's not all relaxing, even if two of the three of us is feeling a little less than 100%. With Christmas nearing, it's time to get to work on the Wigilia dinner -- the Christmas Eve food extravaganza. Tonight, it's pierogi z kapustą i grzybami (dumplings with cabbage and mushrooms) and uszka z grzybami (smaller dumplings -- "ears" -- with mushrooms).
We all have different jobs, with the Girl having the most fun and consequently making the biggest mess.
Magic
Some days just seem filled with it.
A little fire, a lot of smoke, and one ends up with peppercorn-covered, smoky tenderloin magic.
A few twigs of evergreen and a sweet helper and one ends up with a charmed Christmas ornament, a mini-tree for the kitchen.
And there's always the magic of dancing.
Baking
Baking seems to me, a non-baker who stands at the periphery, like a mixture of science, art, and alchemy. One mixes liquids, solids, and heat to produce temptations and treats. It’s a balancing act, and being one who doesn’t like to follow recipes, it’s no wonder I don’t even attempt to bake.
K, however, bakes. She has a classic love-hate relationship with it, though. Despite living in the States for almost six years, she still hasn’t gotten used to the ingredients available here. The flour behaves a little differently; the cocoa generally available is hopelessly difficult to work with; the yeast and sodas have minds of their own.
As a result, baking here requires more patience than usual. Why she continues to do it is a testament both to her Polish stubbornness and her good and giving soul.
Preparing the Meat
When Dziadek was here a few years ago and built us a rural smoker, we expected we'd be using it much more often than we do. "Think of all the things we can smoke: turkey, chicken, pork tenderloin -- all for great cold cuts that will be tastier and cheaper than anything we can buy."
It was a glorious plan. An idea that lacked only a couple of a few several steps to the dream of complete food cold cut self-sufficiency. Soon, though, we'd be raising and slaughtering our own swine, harvesting our own salt from the sea to mix with our homegrown onions and herbs.
The business of life, though, got in the way.
Still, the infrequency -- Christmas and Easter -- heightens the savoriness.
Eating
Pasta has always been a favorite for the Girl, but she's particular about it: sauce of any sort is a no-no. "Bez sosu" is the common refrain pasta is on the stove. The result, of course, is rather sticky noodles,
which can cause problems with long hair.