My room in Alexandria, VA where I am working from had been overbooked for the Inauguration so I went to stay with coworker Anita Flejter and her husband Slawek at their place in Ridgepoint, Brooklyn. Anita is a fine art and architectural conservator and Slawek is a geologist working on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana. They are such lovely people and such gracious hosts! In addition to giving me a place to stay and lovely company, they gave me a primer in Polish cuisine that I enjoyed immensely.
Ridgepoint has a sizable Polish community and they took me to one of their favorite traditional Polish restaurants, Bona. http://bonarestaurant.com/en/ A guided tour of Polish cuisine in the Polish borough? Hell yeah! I had the sampler platter: fried pierogies (potato filled dumplings) topped with some fried onions, a grilled kielbasa (the real thing, not hot-doggy at all), and golabki, a cabbage roll stuffed with pork and rice, covered with a thin tomato sauce that tasted like a very mild demiglace. All was served with a little plate of salads: coleslaw, sauerkraut, a pickled beet salad and a red cabbage & apple slaw. Quite good. Anita gave me some of her batter-fried fish in Greek sauce, a kind of sweet and sour carrot-based marinara-looking sauce. Also good. They drank hot beer. I had a sip and it tasted like Stella Artois with some allspice/cinnamon/nutmeg on it. They said it should have had some honey and an egg yolk in it to give it body but as it was bitter cold out and the beer was warm, it was good enough!
The next night Slawek made bigos. This is a very traditional Polish dish known all over Poland that he put his own spin on. It is made with about half and half sauerkraut and fresh cabbage, although proportions vary. To this, he added onion, shredded carrots, chopped dried prunes, dried cranberries and some chopped pecans (the nuts are their own innovation). This is stewed all day or for several days, Slawek said, it keeps getting better and better. Traditionally, it is made with a meat base; bacon, kielbasa, pork, even chicken. But as Anita is vegetarian, Slawek and I just added some grilled chopped kielbasa to ours before serving. I liked this dish alot. A stick to your ribs winter dish that soothes the soul. Real farm-style comfort food. The kind of thing you hope is waiting for you when you come in from the cold. Interestingly, I had just been reading about making lacto-fermented sauerkraut a few days before ( http://boingboing.net/2009/01/12/making-sauerkraut-is.html ). I will definitely be trying this out once I get back to my kitchen!
Thank you Anita & Slawek!
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