we’re gonna get fat! (every day a birthday)
Monday, October 26th, 2009Krakow, Poland
Who would have thought that we’d be eating out in Europe? It’s meant to be expensive, right?
But look……we’re managing to find cheap eats wherever we go, all of them decidedly Polish, all of them things we said we must let the kids try at least once. We had thought we’d be buying one piece of cake and divvying it up, one mouthful apiece, but there’s been no need. Not when, mini doughnuts (that are not actually all that small) cost NZ30cents each (that’s near enough to 15 US or euro cents for you non-kiwis).
You can get a dozen pierogi at the market for a couple of dollars (of course, we have seen it on hotel menus for $10 too, but even that is not so bad for your average tourist, now, is it?)
You can pick up zapiekanki everywhere – cheaply if you keep your wits about you, although we’ve seen them exorbitantly priced as well. It’s the kind of food you don’t expect to pay a lot for, but tastes delish – a baguette topped with mushroom, onion, cheese, mayonnaise and ketchup, sprinkled with chopped chives. That’s the original variety anyway. Now you can find different flavours, and different shaped dough bases, but none are an improvement on the original.
And because our fruit and veg are costing so little (a dollar for a kilo of plums or huge broccoli or cabbage – even less for peppers, and not much more for mushrooms), we are able to nip in to the ubiquitous bakeries, sometimes more than once a day, coming out with treats that we have been compelled to find authentic recipes for.
Dough:
1/2 lb flour
1/2 C powdered sugar
1/2 C butter
2 egg yolks
1 grated lemon peel
Mix ingredients together, wrap in foil and refrigerate for half an hour
Filling:
1 1/4 C sugar
1/2 C butter
Cream together
5 egg yolks (reserve the whites)
Add, one at a time, beating well after each one
1 3/4 lb white cheese
Grind well, and add to above
vanilla extract
Add and mix until smooth
1/2 C raisins
2-3 T finely chopped candied orange peel
Add
Take out the dough from the fridge and halve it.
Roll out one half to fill the bottom of the cake pan, pierce with a fork here and there
and bake at 360°F for about 25 min until light golden.
Form pencil-thin strips from the rest of the dough.
Whisk reserved egg whites into a stiff froth and gently mix with the cheese mixture,
then place on the baked crust and arrange the dough strips on top in a checkered pattern.
Brush with lightly beaten egg white.
Place in a pre-heated medium oven (about 360°F) and leave it open for a few minutes,
then take out the cheese cake. Remove from the pan when cooled.
(this one doesn’t have much filling – we prefer the higher creamier ones!!)
Pastry:
250g flour
250g butter
3T water
3 egg yolks
Sift flour into a bowl, rub in the butter finely, then add yolks and water and combine.
Chill for around 3 hours. Grease two baking sheets and dust with flour or breadcrumbs.
Divide pastry in half. Roll out into two rectangles about 1 cm thick and bake until golden. Cool.
Cream filling:
3C milk (about 700 ml)
150g sugar
1t vanilla essence
3 egg yolks
3T flour
3T potato flour
Polish brandy winiak
icing sugar
Boil two cups of milk with the sugar and vanilla sugar.
Beat egg yolks until frothy, blend with remaining milk and flour and potato flour.
Add to hot milk and sugar, bring to boil carefully.
Add winiak brandy to taste.
Spread cream evenly on one of baked pastry rectangles, cover with second.
Dust with icing sugar. Slice and serve when cool.
The kids have latched on to another idea to take to our home kitchen, a great one, we decided, for taking on picnics or out hiking. Bread sticks are not a new concept. The carts that pretzels are sold from in Krakow have not changed in the twenty years we’ve known them. But one day someone took a pretzel, which used to come in the flavours “with poppy seeds” or “with sesame seeds” and they added in a bit of dried chilli and some other seeds as well. The result took a plain piece of bread, that we used to nibble on for nothing more than nourishment value, to a place of culinary delight. We’ll be making these for sure when we get home, and will definitely use a dough with caraway for that authentic taste.
Now, if you think we are spending all our time eating out, don’t be fooled. It’s cheap, but not *that* cheap. Look, we are cooking in the hostel too:
And while our bread might be bought in a shop, you can hardly call that eating out!
Oh yes, and as if we haven’t had enough cakes, another birthday crept up on us. Oh the agony of choosing a cake when there are so many to pick from.
Lboy-now9 ended up with walnuts (much to the parents’ disappointment – both of them were hanging out for a decent sized slice of sernik!)
And we started the day with a Polish dish – nalesniki, easily translated as pancakes, made by us, not from a shop! We ate them with also-made-by-us apple and cranberry sauce, and strawberry yoghurt to cut the TARTness of the cranberries.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Lboy9.
the approach along a long straight road across the plain
rayres