RE: Polish food
Tue, 03/27/07 11:23 AM
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Since we did chicken soup, then let's do kluski. Babcia used to do the dough and roll it out and slice it with a sharp knife. My favorite though is "lane kluski". If directly translating, it comes out poured noodles. Literally, I guess, it would be dumpling noodles. It's sort of like the German spatzle. Anyway, break up and mix up several eggs in a bowl, and then add enough flour, so that when you mix it up, you get a paste that's a little more firm than runny. We used to use a spoon to let it dribble off into either chicken soup or pumpkin soup.
INCIDENTALLY, WHAT I'M TELLING YOU ABOUT IS SUPPOSED TO TASTE GOOD. IN THE OLD DAYS, WE DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT "HEALTHY, TASTELESS FOOD". My personal outlook is when you cook something up that you like, you cook it the "real" way, to get the "real" taste, and you don't eat it as often as you did when you were a kid, when you could eat anything, as much as you wanted, and nothing visible would happen to you for quite a few years. Also, when you do this, at this frequency, you don't get obsessed with it and go on ridiculous binges.
OK. So, you have a chicken. Nadzienie, stuffing, at our house, was pork butt that was ground, with a manual grinder, that's what dziadeks were for, you know, the strong macho man to do the heavy slave labor for babcia. Of course, in those days, they didn't know from nothing about "macho". He did a coarse grind. Then babcia would add bread crumbs. These were made from dried Wonder Bread. You remember Wonder Bread, the white balloon bread that had absolutely no taste, but was used by EVERYBODY that was WASP for sandwiches? She'd also add some eggs and salt and pepper, a pinch of this and a pinch of that, and then let me mix it all up with my hands, I learned early-on how to wash my hands, and it was training for being a strong macho man, when I was old enough. So she'd stuff the chicken, and the extra, she always made a lot of extra because it tasted so good that everybody would eat more of it than they'd eat of the chicken, she'd wrap in aluminum foil. This and the chicken were put in the roaster, potatoes also, so they'd get the chicken flavor. If you really wanted to cook the chicken fast, you didn't stuff it.
For salads, my favorite was potato salad. They also used to make coleslaw, which I didn't like because they added green pepper, which when I was a kid, tasted really bitter to me, and ruined the taste of the coleslaw. I really liked the coleslaw when they didn't add the green pepper. They also used to make "garbage salad" with Tillie Lewis diet dressing, which was really, really terrible. So for the potato salad, cook an equal number of potatoes and eggs. From some of the hardboiled eggs, take the yellow, and mash it and mix it with mayonnaise (real mayonnaise, not the sickening sweet stuff they use at places like Arby's). When you cut up the potatoes, make them all the same size chunks. Cut up the eggs, and mix the potatoes, eggs, mayonnaise mix, and dill. It always tastes better if you let it sit for awhile before eating. Same like golabki, they're always better the second day, and on. Or bigosz. Or barszcz.
I've always loved eggs. My favorite is soft boiled. Take the eggs out of the refrigerator about a couple of hours, at least, before you boil them. Bring the water to a boil FIRST, then gently put the eggs in (if the eggs are too cold, they'll crack and leak at this point), and boil them for no more than 4 minutes. I like this with either pumpernickl or rye with butter. I just got back from Cleveland from the Tamburitza Extravaganza, and the Mariott Hotel Chef couldn't cook soft boiled eggs to save his soul (or maybe the waitress was so slow that the eggs kept cooking and became hard boiled). That is one thing about restaurants. When you tell them how you want YOUR food prepared, the people working there will ignore you and prepare it the way THEY like it. PLEASE PEOPLE, HELP US ALL OUT AND SEND THE FOOD BACK UNTIL THEY DO IT THE WAY YOU ASKED FOR IT. I don't know how many times (I don't like ketchup) when I order a burger without ketchup, it comes to me with ketchup. I ALWAYS send it back and make them do the WHOLE THING all over. Once that burger or bun is PERVERTED with ketchup, you'll taste it unless you get everything new. And then they'll ask me if I want ketchup with my fries, or just give me ketchup with my fries. It's really frustrating. I don't know about your city, but Seattle has the worst restaurant food in the world. About 90% of the restaurants serve "American Food", or the same stuff, only they call it "northwest cuisine". And then a lot of places have fish stuff, they call it seafood. My personal opinion is it's because the population of the Seattle area is heavily Scandinavian/WASP, and they like this boring bland stuff, they've eaten it all their life, and NEVER had any good food. So those of you living in areas with a heavy Slavic and/or Jewish (no, I'm not Jewish, I'm Polish.....LOL) population are really, really lucky. The other way I like eggs is fried softly with browned butter. You know, I've mentioned frying a lot. There was this old Woody Allen comedy movie where he somehow got into the future with his Volkswagen bug, and one of his lines was something like, "and when they discovered that deep fried was good for you". I remember when I was growing up we used to say, sort of joking, that anything that tasted good, and looked good, was bad for you. But then, that was when doctors said smoking was good for you, and "Kilroy was here" was the thing.
