Christmas table, 2010

Pictures from the Christmas Eve 2010. We spent it at home in Warsaw and we were totally unprepared. We planned to go to the family from the countryside but I had an accident and we had to stay at home and prepare the feast as fast as possible. It was a true European supper. Here are the results:

something British: Christmas pudding with brandy sauce

something Polish: fish in vegetables (falsely called "Greek style fish" :P)

Something Italian: panforte
Something Portuguese: azevias de grao

Something Swiss: Birnenbrot
Something Polish: poppyseed and dried plums rolls (makowiec)

Something Polish: differrent kinds of herrings

Polish (Silesian) herring appetizer

Polish: śledź
Ukrainian: оселедець
Lithuanian: silkė
Faroese: sild
Mari: селедка
Manx: skeddan
Venetian: renga
Occitan: arenc
Korean: 청어
Indonesian: biang-biang

Hekele is a great Silesian appetizer made basically from herrings. Simple, healthy and delicious, eaten like a salad or with bread.

2 herring filets (mine were about 200 gr)
2 eggs
2 sour pickled cucumbers (about 100 gr)
1/2 onion
1 tablespoon mustard
salt, pepper

I guess my proportions are not proper, cause I should take twice or maybe thrice more herrings, but I personally prefer to not loose the taste of eggs.

1. Cut herrings into small chunks. Boil eggs until hard (about 8 minutes), peel cucumbers and onion, chop everything finely. Add mustard, season with pepper and optionally salt.

2. If you want to transform hekele into a wonderful salad, add few cooked and chopped potatoes and champignons.

I don't like mustard too much so I added 1 tablespoon of mustard and 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise :) That is why my hekele look so white :) Oh, and I decorated the whole plate with chopped chives.

A very similar herring salad is eaten in my family at a Christmas Supper. That is why I add this recipe to my Christmas Menu collection.

Portuguese sweet chickpea pockets

Polish: ciecierzyca
Pashto: نخود
Macedonian: Леблебија
Greek: Ρεβιθιά
Bengali: ছোলা
Mapunzugun: kalfan
German: Kichererbsen
Arabic: حمص
Thai: ถั่วหัวช้าง
Slovak: cícer baraní

Don't be angry on me. I know we have still 4 months until Christmas but I couldn't wait... Anyway, I wouldn't mind if someone makes for instance pascha (Polish -also Russian and Ukrainian- Easter fresh cheese dessert) in December or fry Polish Christmas carp in the summertime... :) So here they are: delicious Portuguese pockets with sweet chickpea-lemon filling which just melt in your mouth: azevias de grão, a Portuguese Christmas dessert dish, absolutely delicious!!

(to make 25-28 pockets)
dough:
250 gr flour
75 gr butter* (cold)
1 egg
a pinch of salt
a bit of water, if needed to knead the dough

**filling:
250 gr chickpeas (canned)
150 gr sugar
zest from 1 lemon or 1/2 orange
a pinch of cinnamon
2 egg yolks
(optionally: 1 handful ground almonds)

+ (optionally***) oil to fry
+ powdered sugar to sprinkle

1. Find a good movie and put a comfortable pillow under your back while peeling chickpeas (yes, you should throw away that thin "membrane"...)

2. Knead all the dough ingredients together. You may need a little bit of water to make your dough elastic but it is optionally. I think that you can replace butter with *vegetable oil or *margarine. Some recipes require the use of *lard. If you have nothing against this ind of fat you should do your azevias with lard exactly, cause it is the most traditional and typical way. Set the dough in the fridge until you are finished with the filling.

3. Blend "naked" chickpeas with lemon zest, sugar, cinnamon (and optionally almonds) and yolks. If needed, add some water (but I didn't). I must admit that I didn't add cinnamon. When I prepare something with cinnamon, I always add too much of this spice cause I just love it and then everything tastes so similar and cinnamon taste dominates. I wanted to feel chickpeas and not necessarily cinnamon, so I just added two times more lemon zest and the taste was fantastic!

4. Roll the dough thinly on your workplace which should be sprinkled with some flour. Cut rings using the edge of a glass, mug or bowl, depending on the size that you wish to obtain. Proportional, put a tea- or tablespoon of a filling and close dough rings forming half-moons. Fry (***or bake!), sprinkle with powdered sugar and control yourself to not eat half of the portion before serving to your family!







**some more information about the filling:
you can serve azevias with chickpea filling, the one I just wrote abozt, but azevias are also eaten with sweet potato (azevias de batata doce), kind of sweet white pumpkin (azevias de gila / chila) or white beans (azevias de feijão). I can't help you with gila/chila cause I've never seen it nor tasted, but if you prefer to make a filling with sweet potato or white beans then just cook those vegetables and add same ingredients as you would add when choosing chickpeas. Just beware cause sweet potato is already a bit sweet. Some recipes omit yolks. Good luck in experimenting! If it is still too difficult and you would like to have an exact recipe how to prepare similar pockets with sweet potato, I will post very soon a very similar, but Spanish recipe, to make truchas de boniato, Canarian Christmas sweet potato delicacy.

Polish cheesecake (sernik)

Polish: sernik
Russian: Чизкейк
Portuguese: bolo de queijo
Finnish: juustokakku
Norwegian: ostekake
Japanese: チーズケーキ
Slovenian: skutino pecivo
Turkish: labne peynirli pasta
Hungarian: sajttorta
Czech: tvarohový koláč

Cheesecake has to be a special guest on each Polish Easter table, same as during the Christmas time, but same time it has a very privileged place in the ordinary, non-festive period. It means that it is one of the most beloved cakes in Poland and so it is, together with apple pie. Cheesecake can be baked or cooled, light as a mousse or heavy and thick, with a differrent consistency that depends on adding gelatine, sour cream, milk or cooked egg yolks, flavoured with cocoa, peaches, jello, orange succade, lemon juice or sour cherries, underside with biscuit crumbs, layer of cake or anything... The big differrence in cheesecakes worldwide is the cheese that we use. In Poland it would be twaróg, a kind of quark or curd, which can be sold already mashed into a silky cream, or you mash it on your own. Nevertheless, people sometimes follow American standards and add philadelphia cheese. There also are cheesecakes with thick balcan yoghurt instead of cheese. I made mine with twaróg. Between thousands of cheesecake recipes, I am sure I will do this one again. I hope you will also like my Polish sernik!

1 kg quark / curd / twaróg
4 egg whites
4 egg yolks + two more*
2 tablespoons custard powder or potato starch
2 tablespoons wheat flour
9 tablespoons melted butter
9 tablespoons oil (mine was poppyseed oil)
1 1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup raisins
a handful of orange succade
1 cup boiling tea

(underside is of your choice: none, layer of yeast cake or pie crust, biscuit crumbs with melted butter or just a layer of biscuits or a big wafer)

1. Mash quark carefully. Pour boiling tea over raisins and set aside.

2. Beat 4 yolks with sugar. Prepare two yolks more: they have to be cooked.* You have two options: cook whole eggs, eat whites and take yolks, or separate whites and yolks from a raw egg, use whites anyhow you wish in other dessert and cook yolks (unbroken!) in a saucepan with boiling water with 2 tablespoons of vinegar.

3. Press cooked yolks through a sieve precisely, mix with beaten raw yolks. Mix butter and oil with well mashed (until silky!) quark

4. Combine eggs batter with quark. Add sieved custard powder and flour, succade and drained raisins

5. Beat 4 wgg whites until stiff and pour into quark, mix gently. Pour the mass into a tray (with wafer, biscuit crumbs, layer of cake or just butter with breadcrumbs) and bake - about 1 hour in 180C (as always, you have to be near the oven and check, check, check!)

(I covered mine with melted milk chocolate but you don't have to, you can leave it without topping or just sprinkle with powdered sugar)

Polish (Silesian) poppyseed pudding

Polish: mak
Sudovian: mākē
Valencian: rosella
Sardinian: pabauri
Sanskrit: खस्खसवृक्षं
Persian: خشخاش
Guarani: ka’amonge
Macedonian: Мак
Upper Sorbian: mak
Aragonese: ababol
Basque: mitxoleta

Christmas time is over. Carnival is over. Even Ash Wednesday is over. But I think about poppyseed desserts still and already miss them. Why do Poles love Christmas so much? Because we eat tons of poppyseed this period, which makes us feel good and very happy. People prepare poppy with whipped cream and pasta, poppy with cooked wheat grains and raisins, poppy mass with little crunchy fried cakes or makowiec, twist cake with poppy filling. My family loves poppy not only in December. We made another poppy dessert some days ago. after New Year. Here it is: Silesian makiełka

800 gr poppyseed
1/2 - 1 cup honey (depends how sweet you would like to have your dessert)
1 cup raisins, dried dates chopped, dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped walnuts, almonds
1 challah or sweet yeast bun
1 cup whipped cream (or more)



1. Begin in the evening the day before eating. Pour poppyseed in a bowl and cover with 1 liter boiling water. Poppyseed have to be covered all. Cover the bowl with a plate, seeds should drink all or most of the water until the next day.

2. Grate drained poppy twice or better thrice in the grating machine.



3. Add honey and whipped cream to poppy cream, stir. Slice challah.

4. Prepare a big nice bowl. Put carefully some slices of challah on the bottom to cover it completely, this is the first layer. Cover challah with poppy cream, sprinkle with a handful of dried fruits and nuts. Continue until all the ingredients are over, the last layer should be dried fruits and nuts.

5. Let cool for about 5 hours (or the whole night) in the fridge, so that challah becomes soft. Some people use water instead of whipped cream, and their poppy mass is a bit loose and challah soaks with poppy layer perfectly, but with whipped cream it is much more tasty!

Polish dumplings (pierogi)

Polish: kiszona kapusta
Danish: surkål
Russian: квашеная капуста
German: Sauerkraut
French: choucroute
Italian: crauti
Ido: surkruto
Estonian: hapukapsas
Chinese: 德国酸菜
Esperanto: saŭrkraŭto
Slovak: kyslá kapusta

Pierogi is deffinitely one of the most important dishes in my life. Not only a Polish dish, cause eaten frecuently also in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and I think that also in Lithuania as well. Typical eastern dish. A kind of dumplings, cooked, baked or fried, from flour and water or from yeast dough. Filling can be sweet, sour, from cottage cheese, cheese with mashed potatoes, eggs, buckwheat, mushrooms, sauerkraut, berries, cherries, lentil, spinach, ground meat or even poppy and raisins. Once I made pierogi for my Galician friends in the kitchen of Santiago de Compostela's students dorm and gave one for a Cuban neighbor. She was about 50 and diplomatic said that my pierogi with brambles, seasoned with whipped cream, were "interesting". But in my opinion, it is not one of the tastes you need to learn since a child to accept them in the adult life. I think pierogis are universal. My recipe will be for sauerkraut filling. Sauerkraut is very healthy, contains a lot of vitamin C and lactic acid bacteria, also found in buttermilk or yoghurt. Perfect for the wintertime.


(here: kiszona kapusta / sauerkraut, waiting for the dough)

3 cups flour
1 small egg
4 spoons oil
3/4 spoon salt
3/4 glass warm water

1/2 kg sauerkraut
2 onions, 1 for the filling and 1 for the relish
(optional: a handful of mushrooms, everything but champignons, 2-3 spoons breadcrumbs)

1. Combine all the ingredients for the dough until homogeneous consistency. Knead until it is springy. Form a ball and leave in th fridge until you are ready with the filling



2. Cook sauerkraut (and mushrooms, previously soaked overnight) in a pot with a glass of water and 1 spoon butter for about 1 hour.

3. In a saucepan, fry finely chopped onions. Chop cooked, drained sauerkraut (and mushrooms) and fry 5 minutes with onions so that all the water evaporates



4. You can grind the filling if you want to, but not neecssary. You can also add 2-3 spoons of breadcrumbs. Add pepper to taste.

5. Dredge your workplace with a bit of flour. Roll a handful of dough with a rolling-pin until thin. Cut out circles with a cup or a circle mold. Put half spoon of filling on a circle of dough and glue forming half-moon.



6. Boil the water with a little little bit of salt and oil in the pot. Put pierogi, mix with a wooden spoon. When they appear on the top of the pot, let them cook for 2 minutes more. Carefully take them off with a strainer spoon. Drain well.

7. Sprinkle with fried chopped onions or butter. Some people love them next day after preparing, fried.

Polish Christmas dried fruits drink

Polish: rodzynek
Tajik: мавиз
Portuguese: passa
Malay: kismis
Greek: σταφίδα
Bavarian: Weinberl
Ukrainian: капелюх
Catalan: pansa
Sicilian: zibibba
Norwegian: rosin
Persian: كشمش
Furlan: passide

Dried fruits spicy hot beverage is a must on a Christmas Eve dinner in Poland, but in my family we drink it the whole winter. It is called kompot z suszu. Susz means all the dried fruits possible: usually apples, prunes and raisins but often also figs, apricots, pears, cranberries and dates, plus cinnamon stick and cloves, or also cardammon, nutmeg or ginger or everything toghether. You can add sugar but much better would be sweetening it with honey. A spoon of lemon juice is a good idea when you choose only sweet fruits, like for example a mix of raisins and figs (which is a very tasty composition and I strongly recommend it)



2 glasses of dried fruits all kinds
the biggest pot you have, full of water
1-2 spoons of honey
1 spoon of lemon juice
1 stick of cinnamon
1 spoon of gloves, cardammon or other spices from above



Cook the water. When boiling, add dried fruits and spices. Cook for half hour. Let it cool a bit and add honey and lemon juice to taste. Never add honey to a boiling beverage or water, otherwise you kill all the vitamins or minerals from your honey!