Big Blue Blobs of Melting Plastic Pyrex Pan...

...Mutilated monkey meat
Little dirty birdy feet!

Sometimes I wonder if that song is actually a political statement.

And Happy Monday to us all!

These ten, eleven days since I last posted have been a week plus of pure experimentation and exploration, and they have been as fun and frustrating as any endeavor I've yet undertaken. My recently acquired cookbook, The Art of Polish Cooking, is a ripe stomping ground for ideas. It is also a completely unreliable guide into culinary adventures. What I've learned, fundamentally, is the "art" of Polish cooking, the "art" of any cooking, the "art" of anything is trying it out, getting it wrong, starting again, and doing it better.

Take one: blueberry pierogi. Between gathering the ingredients, kneading the dough, preparing the filling, forming each tiny pierogi, then boiling them in batches of a dozen, the entire process took six hours, and they came out... alright. Alright, but not perfect, and I was not entirely satisfied.

You may be wondering, why? Why blueberry pierogi, why Polish food at all? The answer is because while I was abroad, I spent a week in Poland for spring break, on something of an adventure with seven friends and classmates. We arrived in Warsaw on a Thursday night, and it was beautiful, but it was freezing. At the time, I couldn't really tell you what I was doing there. We wandered around the city lost and cold for the better part of three hours, until quite by accident we were found by our host. Our first meal in Poland consisted of chicken terryaki (I still don't understand entirely) and an assortment of sweet pierogi. Poland was something of a revelation toward my understanding of history and humanity, as well as my self and aspirations, and I began to realize this change around the table in my host family's dining room, eating blueberry pierogi off of fine china with a handful of who would become really good friends.

Blueberry pierogi, take two. The woman who compiled this recipe collection is something of a mystery, and so is her philosophy toward food. The results of her recipes are dead-ringers for taste; the first batch of pierogi tasted exactly like the pierogi we ate (devoured, demolished, destroyed) in Warsaw. The resulting texture of her recipes has been consistently off. The texture of the dough she detailed was plain old tough. With what was left of my ingredients, I started again, making changes both to the dough recipe and to the kneading process.

Recipe from The Art of Polish Cooking

Adjusted Recipe

So. Pretty significant changes from the get go, but the most drastic change I made was in the kneading. The second time around, I cheated. Well, I cheated according to pierogi purists out there. The first batch I kneaded by hand and by the time I'd rolled it and re-rolled it to cut and form the pierogi it was overworked and tough. This time, I let my food processor do the work. The result was stickier, softer, thinner, and more flexible, exactly as the dough ought to have been. The entire time I was thinking just how impressive those are who knead their dough by hand and get exactly their desired result. That is art, definitely and truly. For us novices, I think, the short cut is forgivable, and this batch of pierogi was a couple steps up in texture from the day before, while keeping that Warsaw taste.

Another common flaw (if you want to call it that; I do) in these recipes is there is no never mind toward mess. These recipes are extremely messy, as daunting as they are delicious. My next experiment was a savory dinner dish, my first ever attempted Hungarian goulash. We were told in Krakow that for traditional Polish eating, look for a 'milk bar'. A milk bar (and I've sometimes heard them called 'Soviet cafeterias', but I like the sound of milk bar more) looks like a smaller, scratch-and-dent Ikea cafeteria, the granddaddy of Ikea food, and also better, cheaper, and not processed or pre-frozen.

Listen. Do what you want in your own kitchen. But judge, judge harshly, any eatery that makes you pay a premium for pre-packaged frozen food. And don't give them your money. (We'll get to that in depth in the future.)

Our Krakow milk bar was a couple blocks from the center square, a quintessential hole in the wall, and on our very last night in the city I tried what was my first taste of goulash and also the milk bar's very last plate of it for the day. It was a victory and a delight, so of course I wanted to recreate it at home. I ended up spending a fortune on ingredients and making a colossal mess, only to discover at the end of the process that I'd succeeded in making stroganov, not goulash, the difference being cream sauce vs. broth. It was tasty, but it wasn't what I set out to do, so it left the aftertaste of failure (with the tang of melodrama). 

That night I drowned my sorrows in Bull's Blood, a Hungarian wine and my very favorite of the reds. (In retrospect it was a very silly sorrow. That stroganov was a mighty fine dish.) 

Yesterday was the most extravagant attempt, triumph, and failure thus far all at once. Inspired by a recent trip into what I can only call Little Poland (more on that to come), I set out to recreate my first milk bar delight: stuffed cabbage, or, golabki (sounds to me like it was named for the noise made when you drop a cabbage roll into the broth: GLUPki). The instructions given were kind of insane. They involved lifting and dropping a cabbage head into boiling water repeatedly; something of a metaphor, considering my bloggy nomen. It also called for peeling off piping hot cabbage leaves only to discover pools of boiling water in the cabbage pouring out over my fingers, baking at ridiculously high temperatures uncovered (the outer leaves burned; I had to peel them off), and then baking for another hour, this time shielded.

Now this is where it gets ridiculous, and you can tell I had boiled my own brains a little. The fanciest thing in my home kitchen, after the beautiful Ninja Blender and Food Processor (get ready for the story of how I made 'ground pork' with a ninja...) are the silicone oven mitts. They are like boxing gloves for cooks. They look and feel like flexible plastic, so imagine my confusion (that's not the word: moronity?) when I read in the recipe that I had to cover my baking dish. I looked at the Pyrex pan holding my brave little cabbage rolls, a pan that comes with a flexible, rubbery lid. Well, cabbage brain, if the pan is supposed to go in the oven, shouldn't the top also go in the oven?

Wrong. This is entirely wrong thinking. These lids are not silicone. They are plastic. And they melt at high temperatures. 

I wish I had at the time laughed it off, made a clever little pun about being unable to handle the heat so get the heck out of the kitchen, scraped the plastic off, and plowed forward. Instead I freaked out a lot, left the melty glob on the stove top, and went to sulk. Quite by accident, I stumbled across the old Harvard Commencement Speech given by J.K. Rowling about the benefits of failure (on the DIY blog of an old classmate, no less). Nerd that I am, I have watched it before (several times) but it didn't seem ever as appropriate as that moment to spend twenty minutes putting what amounts to a lost lid into perspective. 

My point in all of this is not really about cooking, or the less than helpful instructions of an old cookbook, or misguided attempts to bake plastic in an oven, but my real adventures in The Art of Polish Cooking. I can't really say why Polish except that it calls me, in a way no other cuisine ever has. I can't even say why cooking; in fact, I am never so frustrated, cross, and unpleasant to be around as when I am working in a kitchen, so I have no idea why I enjoy it so much. I can, however, say why "art".

Every failure in art is a triumph. Every botch makes you better. Every attempt, even those misguided, only turns you to something greater if greater is in fact what you want. 

So this week I hope to share some recipes, along with some perfected attempts, but for now I leave you with two excellent commencement speeches by two excellent writers, and hope that no one raises the question, What does this have to do with cooking at all.

Happy Monday, indeed!

J. K. R. speaking at Harvard, 2008

Neil Gaiman speaking at University of the Arts, 2012 (hometown represent!)