6. Serve home-made pierogis and golabki (or golumpki to the Pennsylvania Poles) to someone other than family

Gdy pies je, to nie szczeka, bo mu miska ucieka! (When the dog eats, he doesn't bark, because his food will run away)




Monday: Invite Chris and Dar to brunch on Sunday. They are moving to DC from the small wonderful and were going to be in town to look at houses.
Tuesday: Cancel brunch on Sunday because what I thought was going to be an evening catering job turned into a morning/afternoon catering job with Eat & Smile Catering (which p.s. serves the most delicious food, all local, all organic, all awesome). Also, Dar said she didn't like omlettes so it was fortuitous that we had to move the meal to the evening. While sitting on their couch, pondering over the menu, it dawned on me that one of my items was to make peirogis and golabkis. the polskiego dinner was hatched.
Wednesday: fb invite extrapolated the number of guests five fold... what can I say, I like to cook for the masses, it's something I picked up at the clubhouse. I found recipes for peirogis (boiled then fried potato dumplings), golabkis (cabbage stuffed with mushrooms and rice), mizeria (cucumber, dill, and yogurt salad), and makowiez (lemon poppyseed bread) while listening to Chopin.
Thursday Evening: Loaded up the ingredients which I already have in DE for the trek down to DC.
Friday morning: Finalized the grocery list with the total quantity of ingredients for all four recipes then went to the Newark Farmers Market on Kirkwood Highway to procure those items. When I got them inside at Dom Moja Matka (my mom's house ... in Polish) and spread them out on the counter, this is how much stuff I bought:



Friday evening: I arrived home at 4:30PM and began cooking the vegetable stock for the golabkis and the makoweiz. After running into some difficulty (read: tantrum in the Food Star because I couldn't find yeast then finally going to the Harris Teeter) which stole an hour out of my oh-so-efficient preparation plan, I broke my mother's blender trying to grind the poppyseeds.



When the stock was finished and bread was rolled out, rolled up, and ready to rise, I left to go hangout with my homies in DC and asked my sister to turn on the oven to preheat so I could pop them in when I got home.

Friday night (10:30pm - 5:30am): For some insane reason, I thought that preparing peirogis would take maybe 2 hours. I was grossly misinformed. After returning from DC, I put the makowiez in the oven and began preparing the peirogi innards. Peeled 10 pounds of potatoes, made into mashed potatoes, cooled, sauteed onions, added ricotta instead of cottage cheese (as per the recipe).

While the mashed potatoes were cooling, I began chopping 36 ounces of mushrooms and put 6 cups of rice to cook for the golabki stuffing. I attempted to use a food processor but failed when it refused to turn on. push. the. stupid. button. because I had this many mushrooms to chop:



Mushrooms chopped, rice cooked. mixed it all together and they were set in the refrigerator to marinade.

2:00AM - the pierogi development began, officially.


See http://missbanannas.blogspot.com/2011/04/5-get-my-palms-read.html for Saturday morning/afternoon activities. Then I catered an event in Fairfax, VA. Went to bed at 1:30AM.

Sunday AM: Stuffed the cabbage leaves for the golabkis. All set and ready to go in the oven, asked Xy (sister) to pour the tomato sauce ontop of the golabkis and cook at 350 starting at 5pm. Asked mom to go to the grocery to pick up keilbasa. these are the stuffed little pigeons!


Sunday afternoon: catering with Eat & Smile 'til 6:09pm
Sunday evening: When I got home, the golabkis were in the oven, the keilbasa was in the fridge and so I started preparing the mizeria and mashed potatoes. Around 7:15 the peirogi frying began! Keilbasa went into a frying pan with onions at 7:30. John arrived with MORE keilbasa from a grocer in the east village NYC, which was quickly gobbled up. Amy made faworki (chustiki and bowties) from scratch and they were absolutely divine!

BEFORE EATING:


Smacznego!





AFTER EATING:


from Joe, a Polish proverb, "Głód doprowadzi lisa z lasu" ("Hunger will lead a fox out of the forest")

What an amazing experience. I love cooking for loved ones :)

5. get my palms read (31 x 31)

After staying up until 5:30am making pierogis for Sunday dinner, I missed the scheduled yoga appointment with my buddy Cara. When I picked her up at her apartment to go to brunch at Tonic, I said, "We're starting to create a pattern: I make it late to yoga, you oversleep and miss yoga, then I oversleep and miss yoga." To which she replied, that she was never actually supposed to go to to yoga with me that week in the middle, so really it was just me missing yoga with her... oh dear.

Perhaps the complete bunk of going to get our palms read would make up for my invisible yogi act. We arrived in Adams Morgan after a lovely brunch in MtP with Joe "RuPaul says you better lip-synch for your LIFE" Hudson. As we ascended the stairs Cara said she was a bit nervous. At the door, we knocked and there was no answer... and then we saw the buzzer. but really, she should have known we were coming. Inside it was dimly lit and the sitting room had a small partitioned area for the reading. There was a cat named "Kitty" and an astrological map on the wall. There was also some sort of reflexology map for the hands taped to the wall.




Because Cara was a mite nervous, she went first. I asked if I could sit in with her, but the palm reader, Mrs. Susan (Consejera y adivihador, ayuda en cualguier problem de la vida), said that it was a very personal situation so I could wait on the other side of the half wall and listen to everything surrepticiously...

Brilliantly enough, Cara and I both have the same fortune! We're going to live longer than 86 years; have travels in our future (Mrs. Susan said to Cara, "You travel a lot for work." Cara, "No, I don't." Mrs. Susan, "Ah, but you will in the future.") and we both have blockages in our love life, which for $90 (minus the $10 coupon I received) we could have removed. Lovely!

Now, four years ago a descendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson told me I would be married within 2 years to an older gentleman and that we'd have two kids. Mrs. Susan reports that I will be married once (and so will Cara) and will have three children (and so will Cara). She also told me that I have an older gentleman in my future. What is it with the painfully obvious Daddy-complex!? After I parted with my tax refund dollars, we laughed all the way home.

UPDATE: January 27, 2012
Today Sada and I went to the Arlington Metaphysical Chapel for Psychic Saturday. I had a tarot card reading. It was very very interesting!

First, Bev asked me how I was doing, and since we came from a) yoga, b) lebanese taverna, I was doing very well. She said I was radiant. That's always nice to hear. She asked if I had anything in particular I wanted answered. At first I said not really, but then, because it felt like a half-truth, I said that I'm always looking for a love dance. She told me to shuffle the deck and I got to look at the picture side of some of the cards, I'm so very curious about the pictures and the symbolism. I returned the deck to her and she directed me to cut it with my non-dominant hand. Then she dragged the deck face down across the table and instructed me to pick out 3 cards, again, with my non-dominant hand. She said that the cards, going left to right, represented what I want, what I really want, and what I need. I drew the 3 Cups, Justice, and the Five Pentagrams.



We interpretted it to mean that I WANT joy and camaraderie, celebration. It reminded me of the Three Sisters Knot, which "is a symbol of sisterhood and the strong, eternal bond we share with our sisters and friends. The intricate Celtic knot heart is an unbroken line symbolic of an everlasting love. The stylized triquetra or triple spiral, woven within the Celtic knot heart symbolizes the three stages of woman. The three stages of woman are maid, mother and wise woman." The awesome part about this card, is that it shows me that I am living in happiness, because I want what I have :)

I REALLY WANT justice. When she asked where I see injustice, I said that sometimes I get caught up in being unemployed; I see other people with jobs and feel that I deserve one too. It faced towards me, with the sword pointing up, meaning I'm looking for a job that actually is substantial, not just a bull-shit job for a paycheck. The scales symbolizing balance, in that I really need a job that will not overwhelm my life, but one that will complete it.

The third card, the Five Pentagrams, I saw as charity. The two poor people who were injured needed assistance. She saw something different. She saw the two people, not looking at the church windows. The windows have anchor symbols, suggesting that there is a spiritual solution to obtaining what I really want. She suggests I read a book called Write it Down Make it Happen. Now that I have my library card, I'll just go check it out! I also wonder if writing down in the 32x32, the Needles to Say is what I am really supposed to be doing?

Time will tell :)