You can’t buy sausages in Poland

You can’t buy sausages in Poland

That has to be one of the stupidest things we’ve ever said – but what are the Polish choices?

Wieners abound, cheap and cheerful hot dogs sell by the million – we get a pack of 12 every week, for quick meals and to add to soup (yes, we know, but sausage DOES go in soup in Poland!).

And then there’s a vast choice of Kielbasa – white, brown, black, smoked, not smoked but cooked, blood sausage … it’s all on the Polish menu.

But when you want a sausage butty, or sausage eggs and chips, what do you do? Make your own, of course!

Needless to say, we don’t have access to sheep stomachs or a sausage filling machine, but we always loved McDonald’s sausage and egg muffins and the Big Breakfast, so how about sausage patties?

Easy sausage patty recipe:

500g pork or mixed mince (pork and beef)

A handful of breadcrumbs or shredded stale bread

An onion, finely chopped

Some flour for dusting a surface

Cooking paper to keep them from sticking together if you’re gonna freeze them

Your choice of spice(s) *

1tsp salt

I tsp ground black peppers

*Experiment!

Dump the mince, breadcrumbs, chopped onion, spice, salt and pepper into a big mixing bowl. Get your hand in and mix them thoroughly. It’s grim, but hey – the result is worth it.

One you’ve got the ingredients thoroughly mixed and sticking together nicely, dust a board with flour and start making patties. Think a quarter-pound burger for size and thickness. The flour keeps them mobile while you shape them, and helps keep them from sticking together if you store them in the fridge for tomorrow. Makes 6 or so.

You can let them rest in the fridge for 30 minutes if you want to cook and eat them now. For longer – like until tomorrow or tonight’s barbecue, leave them in the fridge, covered. To freeze them, cut cooking paper into 3-4 inch strips and use it to separately stack the patties, then put them in a box and into the freezer.

They fry or grill in less than ten minutes – delicious with:

–       Fried eggs

–       A mock full English (we can’t buy bacon in Poland, either!)

–       Sausage butties

–       Mash an onion gravy

–       In a honey and mustard coating

–       “Chicken-fried”

Chicken-fried sausage patties (and steak, and pork strips and fish cakes)

This was something John tried when Rajmund brought home some thin pork strips – what to do with them? Easy, as it turned out.

Make a mix of one cup of plain flour, salt, pepper, paprika and cayenne. Put a on a coating plate and mix two eggs and put them on a dipping plate.

Coat each patty, slice of meat or fishcake in the egg by dipping it in the egg, then coat both sides in the flour-mix. Repeat. It takes two goes to get a worthwhile coating.

Now fry – for fishcakes, patties and pork strips, 3-5 minutes each side will be long enough.

Muffins

If you must, make your own. Otherwise, just buy them – and remember, it’s English muffins you want … American muffins are cakes … they only call theirs  muffins because even Americans won’t admit to eating cake for breakfast!

Muffin

Cakes!

Or make biscuits

American “biscuits” – John’s bread-type life saver!

2 cups self-raising flour

1 cup milk

1/4 cup fat (butter, margerine or lard)

Rub the fat into the flour till you get the proverbial breadcrumb-look.

Add and mix in the milk, till you have a gloop.

Flour a surface and plop the gloop onto it. dust with more four and fold. Flatten and fold 8-10 times. By this point you’ll find the dough swells each time.

Flatten your dough one last time and cut it into about 4-6 pieces. Arrange on a dusted baking tray and bake at 220 degrees for ten minutes.

Add a cup of grated cheddar to your dough for cheesy biscuits, or sugar and dried fruit (split and buttered, delicious at tea time).

Cats up a tree

Cats up a tree

There’s no excuse for this post – we just thought you might be amused by some photographs of the boys taken last autumn, climbing one of our trees.

It’s usually Jasper who starts things off – he’s the more adventurous one. But Edward is quick to follow, and turned out to be the more acrobatic of the two!

At least the dog stays on the ground … usually. TeaPot!

TeaPot – what’re you doing to Daddy?

TeaPot and Jasper playing the “pretend mirror” game

.

Jasper Catsper in a hilarious “holding the tree up” pose

Access All- Access infirmation for disabled travellers

Access All- Access infirmation for disabled travellers

Access All followed an on-line conversation John had with our friend Deepa Krishnan – head of the Magic Tours group of personal tour companies in India and a Trip Adviser Destination Expert.

Rajasthan 2011 – potter – step just the right height to rest

Deepa had been asked by the Times of India for some information and commentary on access issues facing disabled visitors to India … well, to quote what John said afterwards:

My friend, Deepa, asked me how I’d respond when asked about disabled access in India and my immediate response was to say how good I’d found Amber Palace. Not perfect, but the Palace was built with ramps to allow  .. well, let me put it this way. I commented on the ramps to our guide who responded that “even hundreds of years ago, people were injured in battle, born or became disabled or grew old”.

A ramp in Amber Palace (and some elephants)

It’s sad that, hundreds of years later, architects, building owners and the guardians of historic places still have not come to terms with the fact that failing to provide access denies their business, their property, their historic place to anyone with problems.

Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi – almost accessible

What could be done to improve things? Deepa asked.

There are three keys to access: ramps, rails and information

Ramps, because a wheelchair can’t climb stairs

Rails, because a handrail is so very, very helpful for anyone who struggles with stairs

And information, because without clear information about access people planning to visit India will be discouraged or else turn up and be sorely disappointed. How many people have cried tears of frustration and shame at the Taj Mahal when they found they could not climb the narrow, un-railed stairs to the platform? I was lucky, I could just manage to climb the stairs, then rested before entering the tomb, then afterwards before descending – but, again, who knew there are places where you can rest and recover?

Narrow, polished stairs, lots of people, handrail too low, too close to the wall to be grasped and way too delicate!

That prompted John to write a long post on the India and Disabled forums of Trip Advisor about the conversation and about our own experiences in India. Some places are either inherently accessible or have been well adapted, some places – and, tragically that includes the Taj Mahal – have not.

Many visitors to the Taj Mahal cannot access the most famous building in the world

With a struggle, we made it. The stairs are steep, narrow, un-railed and crowded, but once you get to the top there are places – like this – to rest

Reaction to John’s TA posts and some more thought led John to set up Access All- Access infirmation for disabled travellers as a group on Facebook. A group to discuss and share information about the challenges disabled travellers face around the world and the success stories of some guardians of famous places. It’s an open group, so anyone can join or post and we hope it will be a place people will share information about access to places they visit and other travellers may want to go.

John’s Diana moment – alone (amost) on Lake Pichola, Udaipur

You do not have to be disabled to see when access is good or missing – any parent travellimg with children will experience it, and you just have to travel with your eyes open. Anyone who wants to join the group and share their knowledge will find the group here http://www.facebook.com/groups/651478171544602/

Mother monkies need access too

The full essay John wrote about India is in a file called, big surprise, “India” and we’ll add and edit files as we go – starting on the basis of one file per destination. We’ve also posted a load of photographs from our trip in 2011, to show you what someone who has disabled issues can still see and do in Incredible India.

Bullocks! A bullock-driven well, snapped from the car

This could be useful to a lot of disabled people who dream of travelling but are discouraged by a lack of information. It may be, as one of John’s old bosses said, “a damp squid”. (John let him say this for years before finally (when he’d decided to resign) telling him that squid are supposed to be damp – it’s squibs (small explosive devices or fireworks) that aren’t!)

What sort of birds are they John? Dickie Birdies! Ranthambore

Wódka, wódka, everywhere …

Wódka, wódka, everywhere …

Before Xmas we made some apple liqueur, using apples from our tree, wódka and brandy. Just after Xmas we started some raspberry wódka. Last week we started samplers of three more – black peppercorn, chilli and cranberry.

But have we drunk any? No, actually, not beyond little samples at the filtering stage. It needs a little time to mature (lol) and to be honest we’re aiming for long drinks for summer, not winter shots – those, of course, may come as the year progresses.

So, how did we make our liqueur? Not difficult – you need a big jar and a load of apples, plus the patience to clean, chop and core a stack of apples. Peeling is optional – we left ours on, as we reckoned it would add more flavour.

  Peeled for chutney and applesauce, left the cleaned-up skin on for the liqueur

Our jar is sold by the local Tesco and Real supermarkets as a juice container and has a wide neck (vital) and a tap. In practice the tap was not much help, as it was easier come time to simply ladle out the liqueur.

So, take a lot of apples. Clean, chop and core them (peeling optional, but get rid of the skanky bits). Fill your jar up as much as you want to – we half-filled it, which took a surprising number of apples.

Next, get equal quantities of wódka and brandy. We used two decent brands this time, left over and unopened duty-free, but next time we’re going to give spiritus a try – it’s too strong to drink (seriously, we’re talking going blind here) but you can either use it to make jugs of punch-type drinks, or to add flavour to wódka. The technique here is important, Open your bottles and pour the contents over the apples. The technique part is staying on your feet as the fumes hit you!

We left our apples soaking for a month before boiling up two cups of sugar with one cup of water, then adding that to the mix.

Another two months went by and the apples soaked quietly in our summer bedroom – summer because it’s unsealed so it’s lovely and cool in the summer but like an icebox in the winter!

Then came strain and sample day. The tap was, well, ok at the early stages as we drained off and filtered our liqueur. Later, we just used a ladle to scoop out apples and liquid. We used a coffee filter to strain the bits out and were left with two and a half bottles of crystal clear liqueur, which we capped and put away. Like we said, there was a little sampling, which suggests the finished product is going to be delicious.

Raspberry wódka followed the same principle – soak (frozen) raspberries in wódka for three months, adding syrup after one month, then strain and store the lovely red wódka. (Sampled, lovely!)

The others? We’ll try them out for strength as they infuse, but simply put some peppercorns, chilies or cranberries into a jar and pour over wódka. The idea is to use the first two for Bloody Marys and the cranberry wódka … well, we’ll find a use for it!

Quick update

We wrote the post a short while ago but delayed posting until we had pics. Today we sampled and filtered. Wow In brief :

– cranberry is nice and we’ll sweeten it a bit

– black pepper is hot and delicious

– chilli – well, numb tongues and a slight case of watering eye!

Rose petal jam

Rose petal jam

This was truly an unexpected treat.

John bought a beautiful book called Rose Petal Jam by Beata Zatorska and Simon Target. It tells the story of a woman’s return to her childhood home and haunts in Poland, and shares recipes for personal and regional favourites.

Before John started reading the book, Rajmund brought home some pączki – doughnuts filled with rose petal jam. First taste and we agreed we needed more of these doughnuts and lots more of the jam. It’s delicious. Of course, it’s very sweet too.

This is the recipe for the jam.

Take 3-4 handfuls of wild rose petals, picked in the morning, and 0.5kg of sugar.

Put the petals in a mortar and while slowly pouring in the sugar, crush the petals.

You’ll be left with a deep red paste, which will keep up to two years in sterilised jars.

We’d certainly recommend the book as a coffee table book (the photographs are stunning), for recipes and for the story of Poland in the 60s and 70s and today.

Winter’s last icy blast

Winter’s last icy blast

Here in Poland, the 12^th to 14^th of May mark the Ice Saints.

The Saints – St Pancras, St Servatus and St Boniface of Tarsus – are collectively the cold gardeners, or zimni ogrodnicy. Their days coincide, more often than not, with a brief spell of colder weather and the last night-time frosts. 15^th May is the day of St Sophia, cold Sophia, or zimna Zośka.

In the Czech Republic, just 20 miles south of us (though a bit further, as the road wanders) they go by the rather snappier titles of ice-men and ice-woman.

And it surely was a last gasp for winter.

We had, since the middle of April, seen temperatures climb, – lovely warm sunny days and we’d even packed away the winter quilts (it’s a heck of a lot easier to get the summer quilts into the covers!). Even John had started wearing shorts and short sleeves.

 

TeaPot enjoying the afternoon sun before the ice-men came

Then came the 12^th and we were plunged into a chilly mist that did not clear for four days. We lost sight of the bottom of not only the hills but also the bottom of the garden. A thick, wet mist that condensed on the porch roof and drip dripped of . Yeugh!

Thankfully, St Sophia did her stuff and the 15^th saw clear blue skies and lovely warm weather return. John was back sitting on the porch with his CAR magazine, keeping an eye on TeaPot and listening to music played through the window – without the music and the odd car, the only sounds are the buzzing of the insects, the singing of the birds and the occasional rustle of the leaves when the breeze gets stronger.

But, though at one time we had planned to start on some gardening this year, the garden remains undisturbed – we may have seen the last frost, we may have warm weather going forward, but the gardeners days will have to wait for next year – this year we’ll be keeping it to building a chicken house, composting, some modifications (there’s a bed of flowers and shrubs that gets in the way) and a few flowers to brighten the front up. And, of course, Rajmund will be regularly weed-whacking the grass.

John? He’s working on the baking – latest treat was boiled fruit cake … yup, boiled fruit. It’s delicious:

• 200g dried fruit
• 250ml milk
• 200g sugar
• 125g margarine
• 250g flour*
• 1 egg

*In Poland, flour packs in the supermarket normally carry a picture of what they’re intended for  – bread, cakes, donuts, bagels – but that’s just the fine-ness. All flour sold here is “plain”. So to this recipe we add baking powder.

Step 1 – preheat your oven to 160 degrees.

Step 2 – put the fruit, milk, margarine and sugar in a pan, bring it to the boil stirring all the time, then turn the hob off and set the pan aside to cool for ten minutes.

Step 3 – fold in the flour and mix well, then add the egg and mix again.

Step 4 – Pour the mixture into a loaf tin and pop it into your pre-heated oven for 1 hour. (Do the knife trick to make sure it’s cooked).

We like this with a handful of chopped nuts sprinkled over the top before it goes in the oven – it’s almost like a variation on a dundee cake, but the boiled fruit is so much moister.

There’s also a “soaked” fruit cake John wants to try – starting with soaking the fruit overnight in tea then using the remainig liquid in your cake next day – we’ll report on that one later!

Home cooking?

Home cooking?

In our case, it took a while. You’ll know we moved into the loghouse in May 2012, but it took us several months to stretch our home-cooking wings.

It probably started when Rajmund went up to north-east Poland to do some work and came home with half a pig. Literally. Butchered, some of it made into sausages. Half a pig’s worth. It went straight into the freezer, and we ignored it for a month.

During that month we began experimenting. Actually, we ran out of bread one day and Rajmund did not want to go to the shop, so he dug out a recipe for milk-bread – a great success, but one John has neither been able to replicate nor persuade Rajmund to repeat. However, John has mastered American-style biscuits and manages, with rather less success, Irish soda bread.

“Biscuits”

Cheesy bicsuits are even better

Polish supermarket-bought bread, for the record, is pretty rubbish!

Autumn evenings meant a crop of apples off our tree and idle hands, so we checked out the recipes on line for an apple liqueur – chop apples, seep in equal quantity of wódka and brandy, sweeten after two months, remove and press apples, filter, leave to mature. Just coming ready as we write!

Apples also meant we could have a go at making apple chutney – the initial samples were delicious and the matured jars are ready to open – and apple sauce.

We had one test run, then for Xmas we made three meat dishes – a slow-roast pork joint in a tagine, beef stew, cooked on the log stove, and a big shepherd’s pie topped with strong cheddar.

Also for Xmas, we tried to get as close as we could to the cakes we’d bought in London – Dundee cake from Dunn’s in Crouch End. Their cakes linger in our memories, but OUR apple Dundee cake was pretty good, and HAS been successfully repeated.

And Rajmund made these, which were as delicious as they look.

Those goodies lasted a few days, except for the little biscuit-things Rajmund made, which we shared with the neighbours and were consumed in one night.

But is that the limit of our culinary horizons, or is there more to come? Only time, and the blog, will tell!

There’s a piece of pork under there – it was delicious after a few hours of slow roasting

Website:

Dunn’s Bakery, one of the best bakers in London http://www.dunns-bakery.co.uk/

Winter in Poland

Winter in Poland

Edward keeping lookout

Now that spring is here, we can think back with a modicum of fondness to winter.

A picture paints a thousand words, so here are several thousand words showing you what spring in Kamionka Wielka looks like today.

See the bright green tree behind the power pole? Our land runs in line with the fence, for some way beyond that tree

Winter was not like that! Our first exploratory trip over here from London was in October 2011 and while it was cold, it was not THAT cold. (Actually, one late afternoon in the Jura it WAS that cold, with freezing mist and a strong urge to get somewhere – anywhere – warm.)

A gratuitous picture of the Jura landscape to show you why we thought it might be a nice place to live.

When we made the move over, it was already mid-March and starting to warm up. We saw some snow at Lysina and one day we drove through a snow-covered forest, with deep valleys, which blew our minds. But otherwise, until the day we viewed KW24, it was getting gradually warmer. So we kinda laughed off all those comments about winter winds from Siberia – after all, KW24 is farther south than any part of the UK, save the Channel Islands.

How wrong were we? Several thousand more words coming up!

We had a white Xmas

We had deep snow by January

The last foot of snow fell early in April

Mid-winter temperatures had often been down to minus 20 during the day. We were very glad of our log stove in the kitchen and fire in the bedroom – and the under-floor heating in the wetroom!

We’re on the corner of the road out of Kamionka Wielka to Kamionka Górna. Few cars get as far as KW24 – there’s a better road from the main village to Gorna so we really see only cars and tractors heading past us or up the hill to the  – let’s say 20 – houses and farms close by or in the forest. Over winter, we got to know a few people who had a go at the hill, then asked if they could leave their cars on our land and walk home! Even the locally popular little Suzuki Jeeps could not make the hill.

With Rajmund’s truck and John’s Cayenne we were not badly off when we needed to go out – and anyway, once off our land and a hundred yards or so towards Nowy Sącz, we were usually onto ploughed road – being on the bus route sees to that.

TeaPot loved the snow, even if she DID usually come back from visits outside with a distinctly frozen undercarriage. Edward and Jasper handled it better than we expected, spending a lot of time on the roof and/or in the attic – cue sounds of two cats chasing round overhead. But every night they piled inbed together, to keep warm.

What do you do when it’s like that outside? Well, you surf the net, read your Kindle, cook, make wódka liqueurs, chop logs (OK, we were late with this – we know better now!), and apparently don’t unpack the rest of the stuff shipped from London. We’re only tackling that now!

 A final 1,000 words on the beauty of Southern Poland

Spring is sprung

John always wanted a Magnolia tree. When we moved to Kamionka Wielka, he got one.

Spring came late to the Eastern Beskids – mid-April, to be exact. Because we moved into the house in mid-May last year, we missed out on seeing our land and the surrounding hills turning green after the long winter. Admittedly, we also missed the three days of thunder, lightning and rain that boosted the green, but that’s all part of it!

We’d never seen how fast a storm could move, mind you. 20 miles from the Tatras and they still give a good push – view to no view in under five minutes.

But today the sun is out, the sky is blue (in places) and the Magnolia is looking amazing.

Happy Spring!

TeaPot at play, on a lovely Spring day

Thoughts on a beautiful day at a Polish wedding

A beautiful day at a Polish wedding

 

Wow – it takes some time to get ready

After 18 months of wearing shorts and t-shirts or cargo pants and sweaters, it came as a bit of a shock to the system to have to wear smart clothes for a day. What to wear?

John has lost weight (Yay!!!) so some of his clothes from London don’t fit, and he’s adamant they never will again, so there’s a bit of a clear out. We’d packed some clothes in smaller sizes, and some “hope” clothes (he hopes that one day he’ll be able to fit into them!) so that’s what we moved on to. 4 inches off the waist and we found some tidy black trousers, a nice white shirt and a fancy waistcoat that had once caught his eye and still had the price label attached. They were quickly despatched to the cleaners’ at Tesco – itself at the snappily entitled Centrum Handlowe Gołąbkowice.

Rajmund can be a prima donna – aka label king. This time – he, unlike John, has put on weight – he did not fit into any of his tidy trousers, so he had to go and buy some  … unless he loses some weight, they may never be worn again! But we did find a nice brown shirt and he wore his Indian waistcoat which he picked up in Delhi.

We had had visions of the car being covered in ribbons and bows, but we picked a dozen blooms from our own magnolia to decorate the dashboard and the bride added one white bloom from her bouquet. We ended up with bows on the doors and “Sabina and Maciek” and “1^st May 2013” plates on the car.

The Darth Vader Church

Poland has come a long way in the 20-odd years since the end of communist rule. Infrastructure improvements, new schools, new homes and churches – everywhere, new churches. Some of them are lovely, some are, ahem, maybe challenging? For sure, anyone who sees Parafia Matki Bożej Niepokalanej  in Nowy Sącz will see why John calls it St Darth’s.

 NOT 1.5.13, but you get the idea about St. Darth’s

Inside, the church is impressive, with some nice stained glass and over-lifesized stations of the cross over the audience  … sorry, congregation. With loud speakers, a dot-matrix score board (sorry, hymnal) and a booming organ, it’s all a bit showbiz.

But Sabina looks lovely, Maciek is cutely nervous, the priest knows what he’s doing and there is a good crowd of very well-turned-out people with some very sweet kids who are obviously more used to this church business than we are.

The Manor

Polish weddings are celebrated over a longer period than British weddings – like over several days. Readers will know that Maciek and Sabina got married on Labour Day, the first day of a very long Polish “weekend” that runs on through Flag Day and Constitution Day to Sunday, which is roughly when the party will end.

The Manor is one of several “wedding houses” dedicated to hosting wedding receptions and parties, with rooms upstairs for the wedding party to rest. It’s over on the western outskirts of the city, just onto the hills, and looks out over Nowy Sącz.

The food was excellent, and apparently never-ending. We were full after soup, three meat dishes, potatoes and salads, apple strudel and about eight different pieces of gateau. Then more gateaux appeared, then more, then a meat/salad/gateaux buffet.

The wine – we need to find out what it was because it was seriously a nice wine for a hot afternoon. Fruity, not too sweet. Add finding out the name to the to do list.

The wódka – we need to practice more. Our table of twelve started with three bottles and more followed.

A good time

A thoroughly good time was had by all, and we met some lovely people, though we called it an early finish and headed home because John’s legs were feeling the wódka (not pointing fingers, but those lovely people may have had something to do with the wódka consumed!). Or maybe he just walked too far to avoid using the wheelchair. Either way, we decided to get him home.

Maciek and Sabina gave us a box of cakes to take with .

Websites:

St Darth’s – Parafia Matki Bożej Niepokalanej  in Nowy Sącz – http://www.mbnsacz.neostrada.pl/

The Manor – http://www.dworwbrzeznej.pl/