Wigilia (Quite Long)
So, what do you reckon, an account of my Christmas or some interesting sewing-related thing that I bought? What would you like a post about? I finished my Wigilia post and wrote another 3 short ones in the weekend, so I am set for almost one a day this week! Woo hoo!
Maybe after last weeks impromptu entries I should try somthing that doesn't make me sound insane?
Ok, I have decided.
Wigilia
Wigilia is the Christmas Eve dinner in Poland, or perhaps it actually means Christmas Eve. I don't know and I can't be bothered doing any research because I write these things at home and I don't want to look it up at work and then have to change it, blah blah, it's a pain. You can look it up yourself if you want. Actually, I think perhaps I shall look it all up later and have another post about how everything is supposed to be and traditions and all that and not mix it up with what I want to write about now which is what WE did this Christmas :)
Our Wigilia
(NB, wigilia is said mostly as looks, but with the first letter said as a 'v')
Well, I went round at about 4, by which stage I think Mum had already mostly made the soup, which was of course barszcz, which is a clear beetroot soup. We usually make this, but one year we made a really good mushroom soup instead, as I found that was a not uncommon variation, and I don't think we had a good barszcz recipe at that stage, so we didn't really want to make it. We had already gone shopping for the ingredients Mum didn't have already for Christmas things at about 10-11pm on Friday, two days before. It was pretty good shopping actually. For some reason it is always more enjoyable and somewhat more successful to go supermarket shopping with Mum, and it is fun to go late at night - and there was almost no one there. :)
Alcohol
Anyway, G and I got there, bringing with us:
Back to the cooking
Anyway, so I went over at 4 and Mum had mostly made the soup and my sister, L, was there somewhere, and I'm pretty sure I would have decided we should have some beer. So then, L was making the giant salad, explained later, and I made, umm, something...
Compote
Lets see, I made the compote, by cooking up a whole heap of fruit basically, in a pot, with some sugar and some sliced up lemons - that bit worked really good actually, just slice the lemons, including rind, and put them in the pot with the rest of the cooking fruit and it goes really quite edible.
You can find a recipe somewhere, ours was off the internet somewhere, but basically you get some water and put your dried fruit in it and cook it for a while. You cut up some apples, pears (probably peeled), nectarines, peaches, apricots (if in season - whatever fruit you want), prunes (weird I know) and put them in and cook some more, also your sliced lemon, maybe some orange in there too. Cherries? I'm sure there was sugar too last time. Some cloves, cinnamon stick. At the end you can add some brandy. I think I'm forgetting something though.
Salad 1
I also made the small salad, the tomato and onion salad, that we always have on Polish occasions, mostly because it so easy to make and the ingredients are not weird so it is handy. For this, slice up the desired amount of tomato and onion. Also cucumber if you want, I got that idea from somewhere but don't know where. Did that this year to be a bit different from the past times. Then, with all your sliced stuff in some kind of bowl, or more like a dish cos then it looks nicer - something wider and flatter - you pour over your favourite vinegar (but something fairly normal like wine or cider) or a combination of vinegars and then grind some pepper over it and maybe some dill, fresh is best, as always. And it really is, I'm not just saying that. Then mix it up a bit unless you arranged it real nicely, then you might want to leave it.
Dumpling things
Also, it is always my job to make the uszki and pierogi, so this time I rebelled and said "No uszki", and we had noodle things that didn't work out at all. Anyway, what are these strange things you might be asking, and why does the chef of such things start asking for either a sharp knife or a bottle of vodka, either will do, half way through - in order to end it or get very and quickly drunk.
Well, to start the description, uszki are small pierogi. Both are made of a pastry that can be very simple or require ridiculous amounts of only one part of an egg. Like 6 yolks or something. This pastry invariably will retract back on itself when rolled out and must be rolled very thin, which are somewhat incompatible. It will either stick to everything and break or it will refuse to stick to itself and thus make the things we are making fall apart. Or, usually, it will do both at the same time.
What you do to make both these things is cut a small circle of pastry, put filling on it, then fold over and squash the edges together so that it is sealed. The pierogi are generally about as big as you can fit two cherries in and then just be able to stretch it and fold it over and seal it without breaking it. The uszki circles are about half the diameter, so about 1/4 the total size of the pierogi. They are a total pain in the butt. You have to put a little bit of sticky wet stuffing in the centre of this tiny circle and then manage to keep it in there while you fold some very thin fragile sticky pastry around it, while of course the pastry doesn't stick together in any section where the filling has got so you have to make sure you don't spill any near the edge of the circle or it won't close and it comes out when you cook it.
With either little pastry you have to make sure that if you leave them sitting around for any length of time they DO NOT TOUCH each other, or they totally stick together. If this DOES happen, perchance, then do not try and separate them. I think you will have better luck simply cooking them and sometimes they come apart at this stage by themselves, or can be gently pried apart after cooking, or at least they are cooked and you could chop them up rather than having a big mess if the other options don't work out. They are cooked in a pan of boiling water for a short period of time.
Uszki
Uszki are filled with savory stuff, like mushroom and onion, and after cooked are put in the soup where they float around and look bizarre. Uszki means "little ears", apparently. This year instead we theoretically made egg dumplings or noodles or something, which is just pastry-pasta stuff, unfilled, cooked in the same way. Not exciting and not that good. So much Polish food just ends up totally bizarre and SURELY wrong. If this happens, without an authentic Polish woman available - Polish men of course have no idea how food is cooked, very "traditional - then I suppose you just either try again and hope, or go onto the next experiment until you have more information for another go.
Pierogi
Pierogi either savory or sweet, like with fruit. We do them with cherries. Pit the cherries and then put 4 halves, so 2 whole cherries, in each one. This year, since cherries are a pain to pit, I used pieces of nectarines and peaches in some of them. This works well because you don't have to cook them for long and the fruit goes all yummy like stewed fruit. I love stewed fruit.
Barszcz
Mum made the barszcz, as usual, as I said before. I don't know how she makes it. If you need a recipe, leave a comment and I will find out for you. We don't do anything to weird, so it is not too hard - so many barszcz recipes involve bizarre stuff and/or days to properly prepare. And it is pretty good. I have to admit though, the first time or two that you have it you might not like it, but it grows on you.
The Salad
Lisa always makes The Salad. This salad is out of a vegetarian cookbook that happens to be written by a Polish woman. It has some recipes that are Polish at the end I think, and The Salad is one of them. It consists of general salad ingredients like lettuce and tomatoes and stuff, plus eggs, olives, marinaded mushrooms, mini (cocktail) pickled onions, peppers (capsicums) and maybe other stuff. Basically a big salad with a tonne of stuff.
Fish
Mum also makes a fish dish of some type. This is normally salmon because salmon is generally easiest to get. In Poland, it is supposed to be a carp. Can't get that. We use the recipe from the first Jamie Oliver book, cos we never make fish so we need help. This recipe involves basically just cooking the fish with cherry tomatos, green beans, olives and lemon, I think. Then you just eat it all, squeezing the lemons over the fish of course.
The order of the dinner
(accompanied by the knights of the dinner of the round table)
This is the order for the dinner:
One must always have a spare place for the unexpected guest. Or also, perhaps, for the departed and people absent, but generally I think it is for the unexpected guest. I'm not sure if this has pagan roots originally, but I have read the suggestion that this unexpected guest is supposed to be Jesus, either directly or in another form as a stranger. This year we actually had a mostly unexpected guest for the last courses, which was a friend of my sister's. Mum also gave out little up-to-five-dollar gifts to everyone, including to herself and, most impressively, to the unexpected guest, wrapped up with his name on the label and everything :). Mum got herself figs. Random.
One of the little $5 gifts, for my brother, was some Instant Kiwi scratchie tickets, which G and I had to pick up on the way. We checked out 3 places that were all closed, then parked down the street in town and ran 4 blocks up to the mall because there was a place there I knew sold them and knew would be open - the other places were more convenient places on the way but less certain. Then I bought it while G wandered off, then we mostly walked back, me being to hot by then. Running such relatively short distances is actually pretty fun though and reasonably effective. Shame running isn't more implementable - you aren't necessarily wearing the right shoes, the right clothes, you are carrying a bag, you get all sweaty and then have to be at work all day - that sort of stuff.
General Pictures
Me - I'm silly.
This is what G does if you ask for a "full-length shot". I find this picture amusing because in some places there is snow and people's garages collapse under the weight and their car doors freeze shut and so on - and here it is summer. Actually, the last 2-3 years or more the weather on Christmas day has been totally awful, even for our lame summer, so it was nice to actually have a nice day for a change! (The nice weather is moving later and later, and now it is generally warmer in March and April - autumn - than November-December. Although in autumn it is also sometimes freezing. Ice interspersed with singlet-wearing.)
I wanted to put pictures of the family being silly, but then I thought perhaps I shouldn't. It's a shame cos they are funny.
Christmas Eve finished just before midnight, although Mum and I thought it should carry on into the wee hours of the morning, but L was going to church and everyone else was wandering off.
Maybe after last weeks impromptu entries I should try somthing that doesn't make me sound insane?
Ok, I have decided.
Wigilia
Wigilia is the Christmas Eve dinner in Poland, or perhaps it actually means Christmas Eve. I don't know and I can't be bothered doing any research because I write these things at home and I don't want to look it up at work and then have to change it, blah blah, it's a pain. You can look it up yourself if you want. Actually, I think perhaps I shall look it all up later and have another post about how everything is supposed to be and traditions and all that and not mix it up with what I want to write about now which is what WE did this Christmas :)
Our Wigilia
(NB, wigilia is said mostly as looks, but with the first letter said as a 'v')
Well, I went round at about 4, by which stage I think Mum had already mostly made the soup, which was of course barszcz, which is a clear beetroot soup. We usually make this, but one year we made a really good mushroom soup instead, as I found that was a not uncommon variation, and I don't think we had a good barszcz recipe at that stage, so we didn't really want to make it. We had already gone shopping for the ingredients Mum didn't have already for Christmas things at about 10-11pm on Friday, two days before. It was pretty good shopping actually. For some reason it is always more enjoyable and somewhat more successful to go supermarket shopping with Mum, and it is fun to go late at night - and there was almost no one there. :)
Alcohol
Anyway, G and I got there, bringing with us:
- beer for drinking while cooking
- wine for drinking with dinner
- beer for me to drink at dinner if I didn't feel like wine
- brandy to put on Christmas pudding the next day
- port in case we needed it
- vodka for wigilia
Back to the cooking
Anyway, so I went over at 4 and Mum had mostly made the soup and my sister, L, was there somewhere, and I'm pretty sure I would have decided we should have some beer. So then, L was making the giant salad, explained later, and I made, umm, something...
Compote
Lets see, I made the compote, by cooking up a whole heap of fruit basically, in a pot, with some sugar and some sliced up lemons - that bit worked really good actually, just slice the lemons, including rind, and put them in the pot with the rest of the cooking fruit and it goes really quite edible.
You can find a recipe somewhere, ours was off the internet somewhere, but basically you get some water and put your dried fruit in it and cook it for a while. You cut up some apples, pears (probably peeled), nectarines, peaches, apricots (if in season - whatever fruit you want), prunes (weird I know) and put them in and cook some more, also your sliced lemon, maybe some orange in there too. Cherries? I'm sure there was sugar too last time. Some cloves, cinnamon stick. At the end you can add some brandy. I think I'm forgetting something though.
Salad 1
I also made the small salad, the tomato and onion salad, that we always have on Polish occasions, mostly because it so easy to make and the ingredients are not weird so it is handy. For this, slice up the desired amount of tomato and onion. Also cucumber if you want, I got that idea from somewhere but don't know where. Did that this year to be a bit different from the past times. Then, with all your sliced stuff in some kind of bowl, or more like a dish cos then it looks nicer - something wider and flatter - you pour over your favourite vinegar (but something fairly normal like wine or cider) or a combination of vinegars and then grind some pepper over it and maybe some dill, fresh is best, as always. And it really is, I'm not just saying that. Then mix it up a bit unless you arranged it real nicely, then you might want to leave it.
Dumpling things
Also, it is always my job to make the uszki and pierogi, so this time I rebelled and said "No uszki", and we had noodle things that didn't work out at all. Anyway, what are these strange things you might be asking, and why does the chef of such things start asking for either a sharp knife or a bottle of vodka, either will do, half way through - in order to end it or get very and quickly drunk.
Well, to start the description, uszki are small pierogi. Both are made of a pastry that can be very simple or require ridiculous amounts of only one part of an egg. Like 6 yolks or something. This pastry invariably will retract back on itself when rolled out and must be rolled very thin, which are somewhat incompatible. It will either stick to everything and break or it will refuse to stick to itself and thus make the things we are making fall apart. Or, usually, it will do both at the same time.
What you do to make both these things is cut a small circle of pastry, put filling on it, then fold over and squash the edges together so that it is sealed. The pierogi are generally about as big as you can fit two cherries in and then just be able to stretch it and fold it over and seal it without breaking it. The uszki circles are about half the diameter, so about 1/4 the total size of the pierogi. They are a total pain in the butt. You have to put a little bit of sticky wet stuffing in the centre of this tiny circle and then manage to keep it in there while you fold some very thin fragile sticky pastry around it, while of course the pastry doesn't stick together in any section where the filling has got so you have to make sure you don't spill any near the edge of the circle or it won't close and it comes out when you cook it.
With either little pastry you have to make sure that if you leave them sitting around for any length of time they DO NOT TOUCH each other, or they totally stick together. If this DOES happen, perchance, then do not try and separate them. I think you will have better luck simply cooking them and sometimes they come apart at this stage by themselves, or can be gently pried apart after cooking, or at least they are cooked and you could chop them up rather than having a big mess if the other options don't work out. They are cooked in a pan of boiling water for a short period of time.
Uszki
Uszki are filled with savory stuff, like mushroom and onion, and after cooked are put in the soup where they float around and look bizarre. Uszki means "little ears", apparently. This year instead we theoretically made egg dumplings or noodles or something, which is just pastry-pasta stuff, unfilled, cooked in the same way. Not exciting and not that good. So much Polish food just ends up totally bizarre and SURELY wrong. If this happens, without an authentic Polish woman available - Polish men of course have no idea how food is cooked, very "traditional - then I suppose you just either try again and hope, or go onto the next experiment until you have more information for another go.
Pierogi
Pierogi either savory or sweet, like with fruit. We do them with cherries. Pit the cherries and then put 4 halves, so 2 whole cherries, in each one. This year, since cherries are a pain to pit, I used pieces of nectarines and peaches in some of them. This works well because you don't have to cook them for long and the fruit goes all yummy like stewed fruit. I love stewed fruit.
Barszcz
Mum made the barszcz, as usual, as I said before. I don't know how she makes it. If you need a recipe, leave a comment and I will find out for you. We don't do anything to weird, so it is not too hard - so many barszcz recipes involve bizarre stuff and/or days to properly prepare. And it is pretty good. I have to admit though, the first time or two that you have it you might not like it, but it grows on you.
The Salad
Lisa always makes The Salad. This salad is out of a vegetarian cookbook that happens to be written by a Polish woman. It has some recipes that are Polish at the end I think, and The Salad is one of them. It consists of general salad ingredients like lettuce and tomatoes and stuff, plus eggs, olives, marinaded mushrooms, mini (cocktail) pickled onions, peppers (capsicums) and maybe other stuff. Basically a big salad with a tonne of stuff.
Fish
Mum also makes a fish dish of some type. This is normally salmon because salmon is generally easiest to get. In Poland, it is supposed to be a carp. Can't get that. We use the recipe from the first Jamie Oliver book, cos we never make fish so we need help. This recipe involves basically just cooking the fish with cherry tomatos, green beans, olives and lemon, I think. Then you just eat it all, squeezing the lemons over the fish of course.
The order of the dinner
(accompanied by the knights of the dinner of the round table)
This is the order for the dinner:
- traditionally you have hay under the table cloth. Sometimes Dad remembers this at the last minute and runs out and gets some grass, as it is seeding at this time of year here, which makes it a bit like hay.
- oplatek, which is a wafer, blessed by the church (at least theoretically) that Dad orders from the USA. It is imprinted with a picture of Mary and Jesus, I assume (I didn't examine it and I can't remember). You break it into enough pieces for every person at the dinner and each person takes a piece. then they go round and with each person, you break off a piece of their wafer and they break off a bit of yours. You eat it and then say merry christmas, or whatever that is in Polish - Wesolych Swiat - and hug or kiss or shake hands (man to man. Men are too manly to do anything else).
- soup and noodles or uszki or whatever. It is generally supposed to be a clear soup I think. And if a soup is supposed to be clear, it is supposed to be clear, got it? So you don't cook the noodles and stuff in the soup, but in separate boiling water, or you make the soup cloudy and that is WRONG.
- I didn't realise the soup spoon was the wrong way up at the time of this picture, I am so annoyed, it messes up my photo :(. I liked it cos it reminded me of a picture in my Alice in Wonderland book. Soup, beautiful soup.
- rollmops and vodka. With the tomato and onion salad. Rollmops are pickled herring, generally wrapped around a piece of gherkin. You can buy them in jars. At least from some places. They are secured with a piece of skewer. You eat a bit and then you have a shot of vodka. Or a bit of a shot. And so on. :D We didn't actually drink much vodka this year. I took over what looked to be 10-12 standard drinks, and most of it was still left afterwards. And I had been wondering if I should take more!
- then the fish dish with the big salad.
The salad was modified shortly later by an irrate sister after brother put the large pepper on it. - then the compote.
Ok, it doesn't look nice necessarily, but it is all yummy fruit and juice and sugar :). The French dictionary was to decipher a word on the wine bottle. The word meant "underwood or undergrowth" by the way. We weren't sure of the relevance. - the pierogi.
Before cooked and after cooked. Also look kind of gross. You put icing sugar on them. They are actually yummy. - a Polish cake. I actually don't really remember this for some reason, but I remember the discussion about what pan to cook it in. L made it, I think it was nice...
- tea and coffee.
One must always have a spare place for the unexpected guest. Or also, perhaps, for the departed and people absent, but generally I think it is for the unexpected guest. I'm not sure if this has pagan roots originally, but I have read the suggestion that this unexpected guest is supposed to be Jesus, either directly or in another form as a stranger. This year we actually had a mostly unexpected guest for the last courses, which was a friend of my sister's. Mum also gave out little up-to-five-dollar gifts to everyone, including to herself and, most impressively, to the unexpected guest, wrapped up with his name on the label and everything :). Mum got herself figs. Random.
One of the little $5 gifts, for my brother, was some Instant Kiwi scratchie tickets, which G and I had to pick up on the way. We checked out 3 places that were all closed, then parked down the street in town and ran 4 blocks up to the mall because there was a place there I knew sold them and knew would be open - the other places were more convenient places on the way but less certain. Then I bought it while G wandered off, then we mostly walked back, me being to hot by then. Running such relatively short distances is actually pretty fun though and reasonably effective. Shame running isn't more implementable - you aren't necessarily wearing the right shoes, the right clothes, you are carrying a bag, you get all sweaty and then have to be at work all day - that sort of stuff.
General Pictures
Me - I'm silly.
This is what G does if you ask for a "full-length shot". I find this picture amusing because in some places there is snow and people's garages collapse under the weight and their car doors freeze shut and so on - and here it is summer. Actually, the last 2-3 years or more the weather on Christmas day has been totally awful, even for our lame summer, so it was nice to actually have a nice day for a change! (The nice weather is moving later and later, and now it is generally warmer in March and April - autumn - than November-December. Although in autumn it is also sometimes freezing. Ice interspersed with singlet-wearing.)I wanted to put pictures of the family being silly, but then I thought perhaps I shouldn't. It's a shame cos they are funny.
Christmas Eve finished just before midnight, although Mum and I thought it should carry on into the wee hours of the morning, but L was going to church and everyone else was wandering off.
Comments