Polish home cookin'

It's looking like food ranks high on the list of exciting things that have happened to me this holiday season. Maybe that's always been the case, only now I have an audience for it. My friend B, who has known me longer than almost anyone, says I'm truly a blogger if I take pictures of food and write about it (see his comment in the shrimp and grits post). It's a valid statement, but it's not going to stop me...

I've been in NYC for the past few days, visiting K and her family in Brooklyn, and seeing M, college friend, true compadre and one of the most passionate, yet low-key and omnivorous foodies out there. (I've seen him beam with as much pleasure at the thought of street food in Mexico as he did when anticipating a meal at Chez Panisse.) He was psyched to join K and me at a Polish milk bar in Greenpoint, next to the Slavic and Polish Culture Center and well off the beaten path. K and her family were adamant that we go to a proper Polish restaurant, but M and I insisted on an authentic experience at the stolowka, a Polish cafeteria complete with homemade dishes, plastic trays, formica tables, ladies in hairnets and the news from Warsaw on the TV. The food is better and cheaper--and the next closest milk bar is 8,000 miles east. Why would we go anywhere else?

Eastern European food has a reputation for being hearty, bland and starchy. This is undeserved in the case of Polish food. True, the cabbage and potato make frequent appearances (along with a harvest of internal organs), but they are accompanied by often striking flavor combinations. At the stolowka, we had pea soup and two speciality soups: clear borscht with ear-shaped dumplings stuffed with mushrooms, and a highly spiced tripe soup. I loved the delicate, vineagery borscht, and M couldn't get enough of the meaty, spicy tripe (which I also liked, but not as much as the borscht). We rounded things out with a plate of meat pierogies and a plate of K's favorite stuffed cabbage with tomato sauce.

I felt a special kinship with the pierogies, having helped K and her mom make them in Brooklyn the evening before. We made the potato and cheese kind, rolling out the sticky dough K's mom made on the counter top. I watched her the whole time, trying to figure out the correct proportion of flour to egg and water, while she mixed and kneaded effortlessly. K and I stuffed the dough pockets with a savoury potato and cheese mix, which we then boiled and fried. We ate them with finely chopped onions. Delish! At the stolowka, the pierogies were boiled, not fried, but still served with fried onions.

Other culinary highlights of NYC include Polish donuts stuffed with jam, pickle soup (yum!), blood sausage, and a dizzying array of Polish candy and cookies, too numerous to name, but many featuring the best gingerbread I've ever eaten. We also tasted what other cultures do with cabbage and dumplings during a trip to a Korean restaurant (a K family favorite), where they have some of the best kimchee in town.

We head back to Abu Dhabi on New Years Day, so you'll get a break from foodie posts, and I have enough delicable memories to last well into 2009...