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 :)
Heartbroken I had to work :(
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