fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
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.
K baked.
The Girl sang.
The Boy wrapped it all up.
K and I woke about the time we arrived at the hospital ten years ago.
We were eating breakfast at the time I was filling out paperwork and K was wearily filling in her midwife on the progress thus far.
By the time the kids were up, K was in the huge tub preparing for a water delivery.
When L was opening her present, she was still almost an hour away from delivery. By the time E was licking the maple syrup off his plate after a birthday breakfast of French toast, L was getting closer but still not there.
By the time my students were partaking in their improvised opłatek celebration, K was holding a clean and fragrant little girl who had already taken over our lives entirely.
By the time our neighbor Santa arrived, Nana and Papa had already arrived and been reveling for some time in their new status as Nana and Papa.
Ten years and everyone around us, except for L, wonders how the time disappeared so quickly. Hasn’t L always been this tall? Hasn’t E always been tagging along behind her?
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!”