Dziadek had never eaten shrimp in his life, and so K and I had to correct that situation.
Ribeye steak, marinated chicken, grilled shrimp with garlic, baked potato, and corn with lemon and cayenne pepper (learned from Chhavi).
food and cooking
Dill
Dill is summer in Poland. Fresh, young potatoes topped with dill make me think of all the Polish summers I experienced, but in particular, the first one, which was well underway eleven years ago today. It seemed during that first summer in Radom, during pre-service training, we had potatoes with dill every single day. And so the scent instantly brings back to mind the large, Stalinist Polish cafeteria where we ate.
Maybe that first summer was simply dill overload, because no matter how many pleasant memories I associate with the odor, I honestly don't really like dill. It has such a fresh scent, and yet it so easily overpowers. Summer potatoes with dill taste, to me, almost exclusively of dill, no matter how sparingly it's applied.
Spanish Seafood Soup with Migas
Friday for Catholics often means no meat. Good Friday for Catholics means no meat. Period. What to do? What to cook? Seafood soup with migas.
First, the migas, because it has to sit around for a while and get soggy.
- 1 large loaf of day-old French bread
- 1 medium-size onion, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup crumbled, crispy cooked bacon
- 1/4t each, salt and pepper
- 1/2 cup water
Cut the bread into thin, rather uneven slices. (I tore a lot of my slices up to create irregular shapes.) Then mix the bread, onion, garlic, and bacon together, spread it evenly in a pan, and sprinkle the water over it. Let it sit for at least half a hour. (Cooking it for Good Friday, though, I separated it into two different batches: one with bacon, one without.)
When you begin to fry it, you’ll need a mixture of garlic and olive oil:
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
Once the migas is migasizing, it’s time to start the soup.
- 3T olive oil
- 2 medium-size onions, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 green pepper
- 1 can (15 oz.) tomato puree
- 2 bottles (8 oz. each) clam juice
- 3/4 cup dry white wine
- 3 1/2 cups chicken broth
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 small dried whole hot chile
- 1/2 t each
- ground coriander
- dried basil
- thyme leaves
- 1 lemon, thinly sliced
- 2 medium-size carrots, sliced
- 1 1/2 pound firm-textured white fish (halibut, rockfish, sea bass, etc.)
- 1 1/2 dozen hard-shell clams
- 1/2 pound medium shrimp
Cook the onion, green pepper, and garlic together in olive oil. When soft, pour in tomato puree, clam juice, wine, broth, bay leaves, chile, coriander, basil, thyme, half the lemon slices, and carrots. Bring to a boil, then let simmer for about 20 minutes (until carrots are soft).
Add fish, clams, and shrimp and simmer until clams open and shrimp are pink.
Immediately after adding the fish begin to fry the migas. Brush a hot frying pan evenly with the garlic and olive oil mixutre, then spread about 1/2 cup of the migas mixture in the frying pan, pressing it down until it’s about 1/4 inch thick. Let it cook for about four minutes, then turn it. It will break apart as you flip it — it’s part of the idea, I guess.
Once the migas is brown and crisp and the calms have overcome their shyness, it’s time to serve.
It’s not for the budget-minded. The ingredients cost over $50, since all the seafood was fresh, fresh, fresh, and wild-caught. Halibut at $18 a pound and shirmp at $12 a pound does indeed add up.
But it was worth it. As a friend would say, fresh and honest.
Dispatch from the South
A week into J's visit (J being K's mother) and she finally went out shopping. I took her on our weekly grocery rounds yesterday afternoon, wondering what she'd think of the wonders of American consumer choice, which plays itself out practically in a grocery store that has an entire row of paper towels.
This is not the first time J has been to America. She came for a visit almost ten years ago, but I think she stayed fairly exclusively in the safely Polish sections of Chicago.
When I returned to America after a couple of years in Poland, it was that choice over-kill that shocked me. I'd grown used to little corner stores where I stood on one side of the counter and the food and grocer were on the other, and I had to as for everything by name (which does wonders for language learning). She didn't comment on the paper towels though.
I kept an eye on J, hoping to see what might catch her eye. It was finally in Ingles that she showed some real excitement. We passed an isle display of a particularly southern snack and her eyes light up and she began, "Oh, these are those, those, those," searching for what in the heck you'd call fried pork rinds in Polish.
Thinking she couldn't possibly realize what these things were, I said "the skin of" and she found her word. The best word for something as untranslatable as "pork rinds."ï
"Pig chips!" she cried. "Oh, we loved these. We ate them all the time!"
She had me translate each flavor for her so she could pick the one she wanted: cheddar.
"Of all the things for her to get excited about," I thought, putting a bag of fried pork skin into my shopping cart for the first time in my life.
Chili
Pasta
The sauce:
- sauteed onion
- garlic
- tomatoes
- some green olives
- artichoke hearts
- capers
The ravioli: chicken and Parmesan cheese.
A fifteen-minute meal.
Dinner
Joy
Recently found an Asian food market…and the sweating began!
Babka
Shakin’ the Rolls
The entrance to our apartment complex is situated between two fast food restaurants: an Arby’s and a McDonalds. When Kinga and I first came to look at the apartment, we were given directions which included those two restaurants as landmarks. Whenever we give directions, we in turn do the same.
We’ve never really eaten at either restaurant. Kinga has never been a fan of fast food, having grown up in a country more or less devoid of it (at least in the time she was growing up). I ate less than my fair share growing up. I was never crazy about any of those places, but they were convenient and so I did eat there from time to time, though almost never at McDonalds.
About once a month, Kinga and I like to walk the quarter of a mile down the long driveway and get shakes (she, vanilla, I, chocolate) at McDonalds. No burgers, no fries, just shakes. And smalls, at that.
All the same, I feel embarrassed walking in. Looking around the room at the patrons, I want to say, “We’re just here for shakes! We’re not going to eat this filthy, greasy food, just a bit of ice cream mixed with milk!” And it must be much greasier than I remember, for you walk in and smell it -- you can almost feel it hanging in the air.
The cliche is that America is fat because of such restaurants, that McDonald’s and Wendy’s play a disproportionate role in the fattening of America. While not a staunch defender of freedom of grease, I used to look at that argument in the past with skepticism. “It’s more a lack of exercise,” I thought. But on seeing the average McDonald’s customer for the first time in years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be more the food than the lack of exercise.
Every time -- and I mean every single time -- Kinga and I have gone for a shake, there is always a family or two sitting in McDonald’s who probably have between them enough weight for one or two additional people. Last night, there was a family to the right of us as we ordered our monthly shakes and a family coming through the drive in, and they were all, parents and children, huge.
The question is, who’s to blame? Fast food is undeniably that -- fast, and convenient. I suppose when the majority of what you sell is simply taken out of a freezer and fried, it can’t help but be fast. Don’t these fast food places have any sense of guilt in what they’re feeding people?
An interesting article ran this morning in the IHT about this: "Processed foods? Read this, France says
But food can be fast and healthy. The only place Kinga and I eat at with any regularity is
Subway, and for ten years I’ve always gotten the same thing: a veggie sub and water. But it seems the vast majority of people doesn't want vegetables, but meat. Fatty, greasy meat.
In the end, though, it’s like cigarettes: smokers and McDonald’s patrons are ultimately responsible for their own decisions. We can argue that there has been misleading advertising and so on, but let’s be reasonable -- something dripping with fat or glistening with grease is so obviously unhealthy that it’s hard to imagine who could be fooled by any kind of advertising spin whatsoever.