It was quite a long time since I wrote last time, but in between spending two weeks in Sweden and then trying to catch up with everything at work and throwing up two birthday parties for my daughter, attending some of her friends birthdays (why oh why all the kids are born in the spring?)... then some troubles at work with my co-workers... I am exhausted. Today I felt like someone pulled off my legs and arms at the same time and left me there to bleed out.
I haven't really had a cake for my birthday for I was abroad then. My girlfriends made me the best present ever - they send me a book with vegan chocolate recipes :D That worked as a cake as well :*
Tomorrow still a wave of guests and... yes, then it's Easter.... brrr.
Anyway, since I am supposed to check my students work... and it's Saturday night, I feel it is better not to pretend I work but to do something useful... like, write a blog for example. :)
When I was in Sweden, I spend the time in Nynäshamn, which is a small town with limited range of restaurants and shops. I had to rely on the hotel food and whatever the cafeteria cook (industry on the town outskirts) prepared for me on that day. It was extremely awesome that every day when I cam he looked at me, asked "vegan?" and vanished in the kitchen preparing me something - BIG HUGS FOR THE GUY. However, even tough the cook had a pretty good idea what vegan food is and it was always twice as much on the plate as my non-vegan friends, but then... he decided to drown everything in olive oil. Like literally - I once lifted the food and there was a small soup of oil underneath. Not to mention that spices were apparently not on the menu.
Still, this was better than anything else there, when I went to pasta place, which advertised veg-pasta, and had all the nice ingredients in it like mushrooms, artichoke, avokado, tomatoes, basil. I took it. It turned out to be food suffocated in cream sauce. Ehhh. Thai place made me vomit for a day... so rest of the time I lived on bread and canned peas and fruits.
The hotel's vision of fruits for breakfast was also a bit funny. I told them I am vegan and eat fruits for breakfast. They always prepared me a plate with one apple, quarter of ananas, 1/8 of honey melon and handful of extremely sour grapes. It was set out on the table for everyone, so I guess I was not even expected to eat it all. I guess I should work on my communication skills, for I was sitting in front of it every day for two weeks thinking veeeery loud in my head - SERIOUSLY? LAXATIVE AND SOUR STUFF FOR BREAKFAST!!!???? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!!! But on the outside I kept smiling.
That's me in short. Nice girl.
Anywho, when I came home I needed... FLAVOR!
I bought myself 2 kg of sour cabbage, 2 kg of mushrooms and kept cooking :).
Here comes the Proust-like interlude... forgive me for that.
We, the Polish people, are nuts about Pierogi. There is zillion versions of them, and everybody has their own secret to share.
My mother always made the ones with sour cabbage and mushrooms, and the ones with meat. For me Pierogi mean Saturday evening, when both of my parents got off work earlier and we engaged in family hobby of making the little bastards. Dad was making the dough, mum made the fillings, we all clipped them together and then boiled... and then fried on the pan with butter and ate until we could not take anymore. It is the ultimate comfort food.
Then the prosperity times came, my parents divorced and Pierogi were available in every fridge in supermarket. Never quite tasting the same.
My aunt was making Pierogi few times a year still and always invited us over. During summer, she would buy the blueberries and strawberries and fill the dough with sweetened fruits (covered in potato flower, so that the water would not splash at you when you ate). Then she would decadently use sour cream of 18% mixed with 3 spoons of sugar and pour it all over your sweet Pierogi. It's a skill in itself to take something as healthy as fruits, and kill it :) No wonder my family has probably an average BMI of 40 :P
Well, the other time she would make Pierogi was for Christmas. They would be "mushroom and cabbage" filled, but when you looked inside it looked like filled with shit :P Pardon me, but my uncle believed that the mushrooms should be the dominant part in the Pierogi and since he always had a lot of dried bolete mushrooms, he never spared them. They tasted delicious, mind me. I have never found cabbage piece in them, tough :D
My grandma in her fantastic understanding of my vegetarianism "fashion", always prepared me "Russian Pierogi". Those are filled with potatoes, onion, white cheese, pepper... aaaaaaaaaand bacon. I appreciated that at least she did not serve me the ones made out of pig lungs. Those were also pretty common when I was a kid.
Well I stay true to my mother's recipe and I love the sour cabbage and mushroom ones. I am a connoisseur. I go to restaurants and order this alwasy... and never quite find what I have at home.
To find the proper sour cabbage in Finland was and still is a hard job.
How would I describe the perfect cabbage? It is sour, it is salty. It doesn't contain "maitohappobakteria", which is the Finnish way of spoiling the food by adding milk bacteria to cabbage. When you boil it it doesn't go into puree. As you boil it, the taste concentrates, not vanishes (some of the store ones have flavour enhancers which actually evaporate!!!).
It's a simple thing and I don't understand what is so complicated about it - take cabbage, spend an evening cutting it into pieces, add salt, leave it in the corner and wait for it to spoil. It is hard work tough and you end up with a bucket, so I usually rely on the store ones. But situation is definitely not the same as in Poland. I wish we could do something like from the book "Chlopi", all the Polish ladies in the neighbourhood, do the cabbage, and then we share it between ourselves. Well, too little people around....
Don't get me even started on salty cucumbers.... OK I started... Finnish ones have actually sugar in them!!!! OMG. There! no more words.
The thing about this filling is that you can actually eat it in many ways:
- in pierogi
- with boiled noodles ("lazanki")
- as vegan "bigos" (just as is) with bread
- in "krokiety".
Krokiety is another thing that as many cooks in Poland, as many recipes. I don't usually eat them in other people's homes, because they (sorry for that all) taste awful when they are covered in cake, then with egg, bread, and deep fried and still into the oven. Seriously? There are simpler ways to spoil your food.
What I usually did was to prepare a cake for crepes (250 g flower, 250 ml water, 250 ml milk, pinch of salt - use teflon pan, no oil) and fill them with my stuffing, roll them and ... yes, this will shock you all the other Polish people... EAT :P
When I became a vegan I missed crepes the most. So a quest began. Of course all the vegan crepes recipes assume you want them sweet as pancakes. But you don't, because you want a savour dish.
So here is a cabbage and mushroom filling:
1 litr of cabbage (1 kg)
250 g of mushrooms
(if you have small amount of dried wild mushrooms, crumble them in your hands and use as spices, if you have a lot, use them instead of the store mushrooms.)
1 onion
1 table spoon of oil
2 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon of pepper.
Fry the onions on oil, until glossy (you can use the cover on the pan to sweat them out a bit). Add garlic and fry some more. Throw in the mushrooms (I usually shred them on the shredder for smooth texture, if you like your food crunchy, chop them into little pieces). Add cabbage and pepper.
Usually if your cabbage is good, you don't need to add any salt (obvious, isn't it?), but on some occasions I had to work with "Finnish wonders" where a two tablespoons of soysauce were needed to get some flavor.
My mother would add still 1 bayleave and 3 seeds of allspice. When I make it as a "bigos" or with noodles, I add that too - but it's hard to pick this stuff out from Pierogi or krokiety.
And then, if your cabbage is proper, you need to boil it for a while (around 20 minutes) to soften it. Again, few times, after 5 minutes I ended up having a puree. Such things only Finland.
And then Pierogi dough.
750 ml of flour
1 tea spoon of salt
1 glass of water
NO, I do not use any egg or potatoes.
I put it all into my used Ken Wood, and ask him nicely "please, please roll me the dough". He does it, for he is a great chef. Then I wrap the dough in the plastic foil and put it into the fridge, so that the gluten starts working.
Then I pull out my Jamie (pasta machine) and roll it first on size 1, and then on size 4, and finally on size 6. Size does matter. Then I cut out the nice round circles out of this, and use my pierogi machine. I place the circle in it, put the filling on and call my child to squeeze them.
This was the version for motorised.
If you do it any other way - you will hate yourself for the next two days.
I know, it requires 3 machines and a child... but that is a small price of deliciousness.
You should bring a water with a pinch of salt to boil, and place ready pierogi in the water. They will drop into the bottom. When they are done, they float on the surface. Take them out and... eat.
Or alternatively if you care not about your waste and you are a fan of crunch - take a pan, place some oil on it, and fry such boiled Pierogi.
I love sprinkling my hot Pierogi with dried basil for smell.
And they look like that (when boiled):
And Krokiety, vel. vegand Crepes, which is how I failed.
I found this recipe on-line
http://dairyfreecooking.about.com/od/pancakeswaffles/r/vegancrepes.htm
But as I mentioned, I did not want to use coconut milk or sugar, to have more savour tasting crepes. Plus I had no soy milk home, just rice milk.
It started like that:
2 dl of white flour
1 dl of full grain flour (together it is around 250 g)
300 ml of water
200 ml of rice milk (Alpro)
1 table spoon of oil.
And then I whisked it and hoped for the best.
Let me tell you that I had to remove that first pancake from the pan with my nails. Second one also fell apart into million pieces as I tried to flip it.
Fail, real fail. Water in my eyes.
And illumination.... I WONDER WHAT THAT BAKING SODA WAS FOR?
So I added a table spoon of baking soda, and they started growing on the pan, and looking like crepes and being crunchy and hard and staying together :D OMG, OMG, I got excited.
They tasted good :)
Then you just need your filling and roll them as this lady shows.
Mine looked like that, recipe makes about 10 pcs. I like to add too much filling inside so I fitted the whole portion in 10 pcs. I'm decadent.
Enjoy.
Greetings from us Polish people in Finland a.k.a. cabbage loving super people.
Go check for yourself how much goodies is in a cabbage in terms of nutritional package:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage
Don't be afraid of it, feed it to your children and have some yourself.
When the young cabbages arrive in stores I will probably make a 100th attempt at "kapusta zasmazana" which I hated when I was young, and never wanted to eat it, but now I miss it so much. I always screw it up... so let's look forward to it this year.
Cabbage to the people!
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