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polska

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Polska Choinka

Sunday 09 December 2012 | 1 Comment

For most of K’s life, her family had an artificial Christmas tree. Christmas tree farms were nonexistent in Poland, and if one wanted a tree, one had to go to the forest oneself and cut it — after fulfilling the requisite paperwork for cutting a tree down. (Yes, it seems to me too that Poland has bureaucracy in place for everything.)

The resulting tree was humble at best. The thick, almost-bushy fir trees of the States would have likely been an impossible dream. Instead, they were sparsely branched, humble trees.

This afternoon, when K came home with the Christmas tree, she proudly proclaimed that she’d bought a “polska choinka.” With its relatively broadly spaced branches, it looked about as much like a Polish Christmas tree as one is likely to find in the States.

“And it was only $20!” she added with a smile. “I saved us $20 and got us a Polish tree.”

It seemed only right, then, to leave the decoration to those who had Polish blood — or at least that excuse seemed logical at the time.

Assisted Preparation

Thursday 06 December 2012 | 0 Comments

We've a busy few weeks in front of us: this weekend, baptism; next weekend, Polish Christmas party; following weekend, something I can't remember, and the same for the weekend after that. I just know it's busy -- blur-everything busy. And that requires preparation for the preparation: you have to plan your plans this time of year, I suppose.

We begin in earnest tonight: an hour's worth of ironing. There's a lot of pressing involved with traditional Polish Highlander costumes. I get to work on some of the food we'll be serving Saturday: pork roast goes in the oven as I slice the broccoli and cauliflower for the salad.

Nana and Papa, though, come over to the house to do the real heavy lifting.

Preparation

Monday 03 December 2012 | 2 Comments

Advent is a time of preparation, and if there happens to be any Polish genes in your immediate family, that's likely a domestic and culinary as well as spiritual process. There's all the cleaning that should be done -- not quite spring cleaning, but awfully close -- but it pales compared to the amount of cooking.

We've taken to starting early as a result. So early that it's almost an exaggeration. Until you think about the other preparation that awaits. Add to it the coming baptism for the Boy -- itself an event for Poles -- and it's no wonder that we've begun cooking Christmas Eve dinner already.

The dumplings for the barszcz and the second-course pierogi are ready. They'll sit in the freezer for the next few weeks while we begin fermenting the beets for barszcz, smoking the tenderloin for Christmas-season gifts and treats, cleaning this, washing that -- at least in the old days. With a six-month-old, who knows how much of the scrubbing will get done. But there are non-negotiables, and the food is among them.

Birthday Wishes

Thursday 18 October 2012 | 0 Comments

Today is Dziadek's birthday. Technology allows us to tumble into the computer room at an obscenely early hour to wish him "100 years," though he always says, "Eighty will do."

It also allows Babcia to show us some of the mushrooms that have been popping up in the forest.

Over the Shoulder

Wednesday 26 September 2012 | 0 Comments

It used to be something of an obsession. “What was I doing around this time X years ago?” I’d ask before opening up my journal for that month some years earlier and reading to see what happened. Yet what if I’d had a way to thumb through pictures the way I thumbed through my journal entries? For most of my life, I had about as much interest in photography as I had in basket weaving. Then I moved to Poland. And a couple of years after returning to the States, I moved back to Poland, then armed with a digital camera. And so I can open up a photo viewer and easily look over my shoulder.

September 2001: I’d just moved back, and I was still taking daily walks in the fields behind the house where I rented a room. Such pictures now seem almost unreal: did I really live there?

September 2002: The fascination remained. I was still talking almost daily walks in the fields, heading up to a small patch of trees known to locals as “Cats’ Castle”, watching the sunset from various locations, impressed that the church was visible from almost every point in the central part of the village.

And then an empty year. Did my computer crash? Did I not take many pictures? Whatever the cause, September 2003 is void of pictures.

September 2004: K and I had just gotten married. We’d brought all our lovely wedding gifts — the glass paintings and various prints — to my apartment which was then our apartment. We looked through pictures of our wedding and spent lovely afternoons creating photo albums.

September 2005: Back to the States, to Asheville. “This is where I want to live,” K said the moment she saw the small town surrounded by mountains. It was understandable: it looked so much like her own home. And have a few lovely parks about didn’t hurt either.

September 2006: The Girl was just a few months away. We’d heard all the stories, but who can really prepare for how a child is going to change one’s life?

September 2007: The Girl was with us, and already showing her precocious nature. She sat only to roll; she crawled only to crash; she lived only to giggle and fuss.

September 2008: L, able to walk, began asserting her independence. The innocence would surely linger?

September 2009: Independence increased.

September 2010: We learned quickly that owning a house is owning a project. A never-ending, always-bank-account-draining, eternally-exhausting project.

September 2011: Where did that baby go? Certainly she’s somewhere around here?

September 2012: If I could have glanced forward in time from 2001, surely a wife, two children, a house, and a cat on a tired Wednesday night would seem just as unrealistic as the fields of Lipnica Wielka seem to me now?

Orientation

Tuesday 14 August 2012 | 1 Comment

Exactly eight years ago today, to the minute, K and I were in the midst of our wedding party. One might suggest that I’ve made a mistake. “It’s six hours later in Poland,” one might protest. “That would make it almost five in the morning there.” Obviously, such a protester has never been to a Polish wedding.

At five in the morning, we were still going — perhaps not going strong, and certainly not all of the guests still with us, but going all the same.

Eight years later, we’re still going, but there’s four now, which makes the going a bit more ponderous at times. Yet we still share the same future- and present-orientation that brought us together in the first place: family.

And we’re still going ever-new places. Like kindergarten orientation.

Kindergarten? Already?

Yes, and someone’s already set to be in the teacher’s seat at that.

Palm Sunday 2012

Sunday 01 April 2012 | 0 Comments

In a Pickle

Thursday 29 March 2012 | 0 Comments

It’s a bold idea that only a winter-hardened Polish woman could come up with. It’s more Eastern Europe that a consonant cluster. We need only imagine the ground, frozen solid for months, is covered with snow as a scarfed babcia digs about in the cellar for something to use in soup. She happens upon a store of cucumbers preserved in brine — pickles to us, but since everything in the East is pickled, it makes little sense to single one veggie out for distinction like that.

Whatever the series of fortunate events, Polish pickle soup is a reality, and now that we know the Girl likes pickles — “I eat them at school with my lunch!” she smiles — we have a new soup in our regular line-up.

A recipe for those interested is here, though I don’t vouch for it. It’s not what K uses — she freestyles!

Gnostic Preparation

Saturday 24 December 2011 | 0 Comments

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 withÂ sautedÂ 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, becauseÂ Gnostic denial of the senses has no place in the Christmas Eve kitchen.

Performance

Sunday 18 December 2011 | 0 Comments

What would a Polish Christmas season be without a gathering that included a "short artistic program" -- a skit? It seems the urge to produce amateur dramatic performances leaches into the potatoes that sustain Poles because it's simply everywhere.

Yet the idea behind such performances are among the things that keep a culture alive for centuries. It's the same creative impulse that leads to symphonies and epics.

And in a situation like the one in which K and the other area Poles find themselves, in a different land with different traditions, such performances ensure that the legacy they leave to their children will have a significant element of beets, potatoes, consonant-laden words, and songs -- a culture within a culture.