food and cooking
The barszcz takes several days to prepare because you have to ferment the beet juice first, and that takes a while. The herring salad takes a couple of days to make because it has to marinate. Or rather, re-marinate. The fish course -- trout this year -- is unpredictable, so we ordered it a week ago, for pick up on Saturday morning.
And of course for the kids, it's been a year in the waiting.
Making the list for tomorrow’s shopping is a process that takes as much planning as the cooking itself. I guess that goes without saying: you want to make sure your list has everything you need so that you don’t have to go back out. There’s no way I want to have to go out on Saturday to get anything — anything — we’ve forgotten, so making this list now reduces the chances of that happening. It began last night, sitting at the kitchen table, cookbooks everywhere, and it continued in the afternoon and evening tonight.
Taking a short dance break requires less planning. When you’re listening to highlander Christmas carols and you grew up dancing, it comes naturally. And that’s to say nothing of K.
We had a beef stew for dinner. E mixed the meat with some spices and flour prior to browning. L learned how to peel and to cut potatoes.
The Boy always likes helping in the kitchen. He likes helping anywhere, but especially in the kitchen. These days of Advent, that’s always a good thing: K can use all the help she can get in the kitchen.
Tonight: filling for the Christmas Eve dinner dumplings — the uszka (for the barszcz) filled with mushrooms and the pierogi stuffed with a sauerkraut-mushroom mixture. There’s lots of sauteing and grinding. We probably go through two sticks of butter in the process.
“We’re Polish, so that means we use butter for everything,” the Boy exclaims as we cook.
Tonight, we try out our new grinder attachment for the silver Beast, which usually sits on one of the racks in the basement but has spent Advent on the counter top upstairs. We finally have enough counter space to do it, why not?
We have definitely moved past the “It’s so new — don’t touch anything” phase of our new kitchen. It’s like the old one never existed. Certainly makes the pictures look better.
When we woke up, it was twenty-seven degrees outside. For South Carolina, that’s cold, especially in December. The really low temperatures like that don’t usually hit until January and February. It creates a challenge for the day’s activity: smoking of the holiday meat.
With twenty-some pounds of pork loin, a rack of ribs (for soups), and several pounds of chicken to smoke, I’m going to have a long, cold day in such weather.
Fortunately the Boy comes out to help.
At least for a while.
The Boy really wants to learn how to cook, so we’ve begun, somewhat unplanned, to recognize spices.
When I gave him cinnamon, he wrinkled his nose a bit, took another sniff, then asked, “Did we put that in the sauce for Thanksgiving?” I nodded my head. “Oh, it’s crunched up cinnamon sticks!”
"It's cold and rainy!" I said as I came back inside from taking pictures of the Boy, who was more thrilled than I was that it was cold and rainy. After a blistering dry summer, to have finally some cold, wet weather is a blessing.
It made the rosół we had for lunch all the tastier, the cuddling with Papa and Nana all the more comfortable, and family movie in the early evening all the more enjoyable.
The automatically created URL for this post indicates that this is the fourth time I've used "Rainy Sunday" as a post title:
All within the last three years.
In the morning, it's cooking. And the Boy wants to help. He wants so much to be a big boy, to do the things he sees adults do, to do the things he sees me do. It's humbling to think that I am for him the example of what a man is supposed to be.
After a few hours of work, we head to the backyard, where the leaves make a kaleidoscopic carpet and curtains. One advantage of things not being as wet as they often are -- there are colors. The last few years, it's seemed like it rained a lot during autumn and all the leaves just turned black and fell off. This year, there's no chance of that happening. Sure, we're eleven inches behind in rainfall now. But those colors.
Mid-afternoon, it's back to the kitchen to finish up everything. This goes into the oven, that comes out. The turkey remains the whole time. K's a bit nervous about the turkey: we haven't done a turkey. Ever. It's not "We haven't done a turkey like this" or "We haven't done a turkey in this gas oven" -- we just have never baked a whole turkey. Nana and Papa always contributed that to the Thanksgiving dinner. Still, how hard can it be? Research a few recipes, double-check the temperature and time in relation to the weight, then wait.
In the end, everything turns out fine.
Better than fine.
Everyone goes home, K goes to bed early, and I head downstairs for an after-dinner drink and cigar. I scroll through what's new on Netflix and see one of my all-time favorite movies is now streaming: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
How can I resist?
K takes care of Wigilia. We share Easter.
Tomorrow, it's my dinner.
