More recipes to post?

[franek80]

Lily
The white Borscht is mostly for Easter. We add hard boiled eggs to the Borscht when we eat it along with Kielbasa.. We also make the same white borscht all year using spare ribs,green beans and potatoes

[franek80]

LILY;
Here is a true storyy as I lived it about white borscht.They used picle juice insted of vinigar

Sam Holden By Charles Cohen

For 20 years, the last of the bean pickers and their descendants have gathered at the Polish Home, a social hall in Fells Point, to eat the food of hardship and strife and to dance the merry polka.
The affair may be billed as the "Bean Pickers Dance," but music and merriment aren't the star attractions. The substance that made this annual affair a bona fide tradition sits simmering on the stove, nurtured by a half-dozen women and one man, ranging in age from their 40s to their 80s.

"A lot of people come and ask how we make the bean soup, but even if we tell them they'll come back and say it doesn't taste like ours," one of the cooks, 79-year-old Anna Cwalina, says. "I think we have some extra ingredient that we just throw in there," the 79-year-old adds mischievously.

Behind every tradition, there's the food that goes along with it. Thanksgiving has turkey. Passover has matzo. Halloween has candy. The Bean Pickers Dance has its bean soup, a reminder of when Polish East Baltimore experienced its own version of The Grapes of Wrath.

During the Depression, when many Americans lost their jobs, road bosses would round up crews from East Baltimore neighborhoods and take them out to Baltimore County and Pennsylvania to pick seasonal crops for a half a cent a pound or 75 cents per 100-pound bag. Back then, even the smallest income meant something, and in the '30s, kids and the elderly and anyone else who wasn't lucky enough to have a job went to small towns such as Pennsylvania's Stewartstown and High Rock and Maryland's Hickory. The workers lived in shacks, slept in beds of straw, and bathed in streams.

After string-bean season came the harvests of tomatoes and corn, which kept families in the fields into October. Some kids were taken out of school and never returned, and none thought of summer as a vacation. Picking vegetables seven days a week required "hinges in your back," says Antoinette Clark, who was 12 years old when her mother and seven siblings went to "Bean Country." Cold pre-dawn mornings would turn into blazing hot afternoons spent enduring the bites of insects and encounters with the yellow goo that worms leave when they cling to vines.

"These people came home from working all day in the sun continuously on one knee stooped over--it was pretty rough," Carter says. "I took care of my two brothers and sister, when [the rest of the family] went out in the field. I cooked, cleaned, washed clothes, everything. My mother did not have to do nothing."

When they returned from a hard day's work, they supped on bean soup. Beans they had stuffed into their pockets or in spare lunch bags went into the pot. So did fresh cream from the cows, stock bones, dill, potatoes, and pickle juice--the same ingredients the folks at Polish Home put together some seven decades later. And for a dish born of hardship and strife, it tastes pretty darn good.

"The pickle juice was what gives it its oomph," 84-year-old Gertrude Jankowiak says as I wolf down a cupful.

Although the bean pickers like to remind listeners about the hardships they endured, their Depression saga is spiced with fond recollections.

Ed Lemis, 76, who picked his beans in New Windsor, points out that Baltimore in the 1930s was saturated with industry. A city kid's idea of a swimming hole was the harbor; one kid would jump into the water and push the filth out the way so the rest of the gang could follow. Steam engines would turn laundry on the line black with soot.

Then, suddenly, an industrial slump pushed families out into the country, where these urban urchins built dams out of sand-filled burlap bags, swam in clean streams, and, after a day in the field, felt the cut of a cool breeze even on hot nights. Someone would break out a harmonica or an accordion, Carter recalls, and "we'd dance in the dirt."

Until 20 years ago, those country memories were just stories told around the neighborhood. But Joseph "Cigar Joe" Borzymowski, then the president of the Polish Home, wanted to organize a dance so all the bean pickers could meet. At those early dances, fake outhouses were built. Live ducks and chickens were brought in. Each table had a bean-plant centerpiece. People dressed up in country garb. Meanwhile, the cooks in the kitchen consulted the last of the Polish-born pickers--their mothers and fathers--to nail down the true bean-soup recipe.

Today, the dance goes on without the props and livestock, and just about all the parents who took their children to bean country have died. What's left are the children of the bean pickers, who tell the stories as the soup simmers on the stove.
e is a true story about the white Borscht.. This is life the way I lived it as a kid

[bescheid]

Frank

That was a wonderful story of your early life. Thank you for telling it! Now of course, each and every time I eat beans, I will remember your story....

Charles

[Pawian]

admin said:

Guys,
if you have any more recipes to post please let me know!
I would post it with a pleasure
Just make sure this is your recipe, not something which is quoted word after word from the cookbook

I hope I invented a new recipe, or at least a new version of some recipe.
It isn`t Polish cuisine. It is more Chinese or something, because it is about seafood.

CRISPY SEAFOOD MOCK OMELETTE:

You need mixed seafood, e.g. mussels, baby octopus, rings of squid, cocktail shrimps. But first of all, you need surimi, i.e. mock crab sticks.

Shred surimi sticks into thin stripes which is quite easy because they are soft and delicate, about two inches long.

Roll all the seafood you have in flour (I use corn flour). Try to mix it well so that thin stripes of surimi entangle other pieces of seafood and everything sticks together.

Fry in oil (I use olive oil). While frying, try to form your seafood into an oval shape, like an omelette. You can turn it over in the pan to fry the other side.

When well fried, the "omelette" shouldn`t break up and it must be crispy. Serve with rice, of course. I use brown rice.

PS. It is my favourite dish, I love everything that is crispy and puts up some crackling resistance to my teeth.

My wife and sons love it, too.

[justjohn]

Roasted Glazed Turnips with Bacon and Balsamic Vinegar


Use only purple-top turnips for this recipe; yellow turnips (rutabagas) take longer to cook.

Serves 6

2 pounds turnips (purple-topped), peeled and cut into 3/4-inch
cubes
4 shallots , peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
Table salt and ground black pepper
3 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 tablespoon melted and 2
tablespoons cubed)
1/2 cup water
6 slices bacon , cut into 1/4-inch strips and cooked until crisp


1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450 degrees. Toss turnips, shallots, syrup, vinegar, rosemary, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and melted butter in 13 by 9-inch Pyrex baking dish. Pour water over vegetables, cover with foil, and roast until turnips begin to soften, about 25 minutes.

2. Remove foil and continue to roast, tossing occasionally, until turnips are tender and spotty brown and liquid is reduced to thick glaze, 25 to 30 minutes. Add bacon and cubed butter and toss. Adjust seasonings and serve.

[gardenmoma]

John

That is a neat recipe for such an "unusual vegetable." I am looking forward to trying it

GM

[joanzaniskey]

Anyone know if you can do the babka in a bread maker? Thanks
Joan

[piwo]

joanzaniskey said:

Anyone know if you can do the babka in a bread maker? Thanks
Joan

I don't know, but why would you want to? The recipe we use is so easy, no kneeding, and I can't possibly see what a bread maker would add to the process... We can chat offline if you'd like about the process....

[gardenmoma]

01/25

Joan,

I do use my bread maker because the recipe I use calls for kneading and rising. I set the machine to the dough cycle and then when it is ready, I finish by hand.

GM

[mskaz]

I was just reading the recipe for the Goloumbki in the latest newsletter. Here's trick for the cabbage. Core the cabbage and then place it in a large plastic bag and freeze it for at least 24 hours. Just remember that it takes more than 24 hours to defrost. Once defrosted the leaves will easily peel off. I still boil them for a short time because it makes it easier to make the pigeons. And, adding salt to the water, the leaves are stay a little greener and it adds to the taste.

[Jaga]

Hello mskaz,

welcome to the forum! Interesting tip! Does freezing not affect a taste of a cabbage a bit? Does it not make to crunchy and breakable?