Polish Food

When was the last time you said, "Let's go out for some Polish food,"?  I have to say Polish food was filling, tasty, relatively healthy, and CHEAP!

Usually when my mother and I travel, we eat out of the grocery store due to her violent allergy to fish.  Luckily for us on this trip, Poland isn't known for seafood and we felt comfortable enough to frequent the bars.  The MILK bars that is ;)  Back in communist times, milk bars were a government subsidized lunch counter because a well fed worker is a productive worker.  Nowadays the milk bars are still present and a wonderful place to get an authentic and local meal for a great price.  Note the little booth in this picture.  They are selling obwarzanek which are the Polish street pretzels you see EVERYWHERE.  The weather was cooler or maybe it was spitting out because the vendor has the vinyl shelter flaps put up.  The pretzels cost about 40 cents.

We stayed in Krakow and everyone who visits Krakow goes to the main square and the cloth hall for shopping.  We did plenty of that but we also took time to walk up Grodska street to visit this milk bar.  I want to say it was #27 but I could be wrong.  Just look for this blue sign.  You walk in and they have a Polish/English menu on the wall.

 It looks like your typical lunch counter.  You pick up your tray and tell the gal what you want.  In our case, we wrote down what we wanted in Polish on our handy dandy notebook and showed it to her. 

She then goes to the little window in the back and places your order.  Anything hot came through the little window from the kitchen.  All the salads and beverages were already dished up and sitting waiting on the counter. You bus your own table by taking your dishes up to the counter at the end of your meal.

 These are the cottage cheese dumplings with strawberry sauce my mother ordered.

 Here is my order of potato pancakes with goulash of pork.  I think most Americans think goulash is made of macaroni noodles and ground beef and tomato sauce.  Goulash in Poland means meat sauce and this was DELICIOUS!  Num NUM!

 This was my dad's roast pork with mushroom sauce with a serving of the ubiquitous carrot salad we saw everywhere and the mashed potatoes topped with dried dill weed.

 This was a plate of 'salads' that we also saw everywhere!  And it was delicious.  We saw green and red cabbage varieties of salad that were bona fide salads.  They had a light slightly salty and sweet dressing and were filling and delicious.  We Americans eat cabbage salad smothered in mayonnaise and call it cole slaw.  After tasting this I ordered it in every milk bar we frequented.

 

 This is the bar we visited on Kasimierz street after we visited the Jewish market and the site of a major scene used in the film Schindler's List.  It was a block or two up the street from the ethnographic museum and was a really local hole in the wall place.  We saw lots of old age pensioners visiting this lunch counter and most of them came to get take-away meals.  They'd bring in a quart jar and the lunch counter lady would fill it up with soup or Borscht or whatever.  I had a cheat sheet of common Polish menu items and the wonderfully sympathetic lunch counter lady saved our lives by uttering, "English menu?" 

 

 Typical milk bar set up.  My biggest pet peeve about the milk bars was that the juices and kefirs were already poured out and sitting on the counter at room temperature but that seemed to be the standard procedure in all the bars. 

 Here is another version of the ubiquitous cabbage and carrot salad.  Delicious.

 Here is my order of meat and rice stuffed cabbage leaves with dried dill topped potatoes.  My brother makes very good stuffed cabbage leaves and I need to get his recipe.

 Here are my mom's strawberry stuffed pirogi. 

 I absolutely couldn't wait to buy a red cabbage when we got home.  I made my first attempt at Polish cabbage salad using my mandolin but then I remembered I had this implement of destruction lurking in my cupboards. My sister gave me this years ago and I'd never used it before.  It is a Salad Master and is the most low tech but versatile kitchen tool.  This was the first time I'd used it and it has earned a permanent home in my hall closet.  I tweaked the following recipe to taste:

1/2 head of shredded cabbage
3 tsp. salt
2 finely grated carrots
1 finely grated onion
1/4 c. vinegar
6 Tbsp. stevia
2 Tbsp. oil

All this is to taste of course.  I ended up putting some garlic powder in too.  The salt softens the cabbage and brings out the water which becomes most of the dressing.  I never thought raw cabbage could be so simple and tasty.

The next thing I wanted to try to make was potato pancakes.  Polish potato pancakes were not like latkes and seemed to be made more of mashed than grated potatoes.  I found this recipe and the first time I made them, I was too lazy to get out my food processor and I just grated the potatoes on my box grater.  The pancakes turned out ok but the recipe yielded about 8-9 pancakes.

I wanted to make these along with pork goulash for Dave's supper.  This time I used the food processor as instructed and was happier with the texture.  We got enough to feed us both and pack 4 box lunches for work!

For the goulash, I got an 18 oz. pork tenderloin on sale at Cub and used that for the meat.  I used this recipe and it was delicious.  The meat just melts in your mouth.  I used half the amount of paprika called for but next time I'll use the whole amount.  I have a BAG or two of paprika my parents brought me from Budapest and I bought some more from Poland.  I thought it was fitting to serve this on my Polish pottery too!  I bought 12 place settings of it on the trip and am eagerly awaiting a knock on the door from the UPS man.  I will post pictures when they arrive.

As far as kitchen souvenirs (I like finding things overseas to put in my kitchen because I will use them regularly), I am proud to say I did NOT get any wooden spoons!  The first thing all my Anderson family members said when they came to Christmas last year was, "You have a lot of wooden spoons and spatulas!"  I bought a bunch of packets of dried herbs and spices at the grocery store.  I know we have dried dill here but I wanted Polish dill and they were CHEAP!  A huge packet like that cost about 25c.  I also bought a bunch of hostess napkins for not quite $2-including a polish pottery print.  Hostess napkins cost well over $6 in gift shops here.  That wooden mushroom is in fact a nutcracker and cost around $2.50.  We visited a salt mine and I bought a salt grinder and a bag of rock salt.  We visited Schindler's factory and they sold small enameled cups and of course I bought one.  I love enamelware and before the trip was even thinking I wanted to find a functional piece to bring home.  I found that small green pot and lid in a shop in Wadowice and it cost not quite $10.

Prices were very cheap in Poland.  A loaf of bread cost $1.  A liter of milk cost $1.  10 eggs cost $2.50 and they were free range organic eggs--the most flavorful I've ever tasted.  They sold eggs in packages of 10 or 20 which I thought was so funny--but they probably think we're crazy for selling ours in such an un-metric number as 12!  150 grams of bacon was $1.30 and it was lean bacon but again, the most flavorful I've ever tasted.  It was so lean that we fried up cooked potatoes with some chunked bacon for breakfast and we had to add butter to the pan!  A liter of fruit juice was $1.  A kilo of wax beans was 75c.  A huge head of cauliflower was 50c.  They had the most beautiful produce I'd ever seen.

And most of the museums we went to were free one day a week and we planned to visit that day.  If you had to pay to get in, they were around $2 or so.  Mom and I were saying that in London, any museum or site you want to see costs $15-$20!