Jarmark Warszawa

It seems that Plac Defilad is getting some use this year.  It's usually an eyesore of a parking lot and bus station, but the Fan Zone and now the Jarmark Warszawa (Warsaw Christmas Fair) have actually put it to some use.  Last year, the jarmark was on the south side of the PKiN.  This year, it's a little bigger (still smaller than the one in the Old Town Square), and sports a small bar, a ferris wheel, some other rides, crappy Christmas techno, and the wooden stalls selling gloves, food, scarves, and knickknacks.

The 'Warsaw Eye' and the Palace.

The entrance.

I'll ride this some time and write about the views and whether it was worth it.

 I actually like Christmas markets.  I like buying the overpriced mulled wine (not much mead for sale) and hearty bread with smalec and ogorki kiszone.  The music could be toned down (really, it's terrible.  It's almost offensive how bad it is).
It's worth fifteen minutes to ramble through.

Strawberry Time!

One thing I must say about Northern Europe, the produce comes to market far earlier than I am used to.
I come from a place where strawberries are only beginning in mid-June and are full fledged in the beginning of July.  In Poland, strawberries burst onto the scene in late May and early June.  Soon, every peddler on the street is hawking baskets of strawberries upon strawberries.  Cherries will follow in the coming weeks, and I am looking forward to that.

Selling strawberries out of a van.

 A traditional way to prepare the strawberries (besides jams and jellies) is to hull them, cut them, sprinkle them with sugar so they form a tart, sweet, chunky sauce of sorts.  This versatile way of prepping the strawberries allows them to be ladled over nalesniki (crepes) stuffed with cheese, put into fruit smoothies, and mixed with yogurt and cream and eaten with pasta.

Fresh-bought strawberries ready to be washed.

Market Day!

For those of you lucky enough to be within reasonable distance of farmers market, you may want to visit there as often as you can.  There are not just a great selection of fresh vegetables at jaw-dropping prices (1zl for a kilo of potatoes!) there is also a great social experience.  I could go to a farmer's market just to watch the vendors and the shoppers.  It's not like a supermarket where everyone pushes around those metal carts surveying the choices of potato chips and listening to soft hits; here, grizzled farmers with dusty hands the size of dinner plates scoop up potatoes, beets, carrots and dump them into a bag to weigh them.  People mill about the stalls, examining the produce and always looking for the best deals.  Hawkers call out to passersby, sometimes urging to try to taste their superior products.

Shoppers pick up fresh produce at the bazaar.

If you are late in the day (everyone is packing up by 2:30-3:00), sometimes you can haggle over the price of the last remaining cauliflower.  Often, later in the day, you can see where hawkers have scratched out the original prices and marked down their goods just to get them to move.
The farmer market I attended to weekly starts in mid-spring.  I am always eager to buy fresh vegetables, especially tomatoes, because the ones in the grocery stores always tasteless.  Fruits and vegetables that are shipped to supermarkets are picked unripe, then exposed ethylene in transit so they ripen just in time to hit the shelves.  The downside of the fruit not ripening naturally is that the flavors are not as complex and rich as those in naturally-ripened fruit.  During the summer and autumn months, many supermarkets try to carry fruits and vegetables from local sources.  This is especially true in Poland because the weak zloty makes imports more expensive, so it's more economical to buy natively anyway.  But, regardless, I like to buy straight from the farmer.
One of the exciting things about the bazaar is that the in-season produce is always changing.  Prices fluctuate week to week, and it's a little game to buy as much of one product when the price dips low.  Some produce, like fava beans, were available for only two weeks.  I missed my opportunity to buy as much as I can to turn into falafel and hummus (chickpeas are expensive and rare here.  So is tahini.)
A few stalls sell things like cured meats, cheeses, preserves, honey, and imported fruits.  From my experience, these can be hit or miss.  I've gotten excellent cheese and kabanosy (small, dried sausages), but have gotten some not-so-great kielbasa as well.  Many vendors have huge barrels full of ogórki malo solny (a type of pickle) and sauerkraut.

Peaches for sale.

Farmers markets don't just offer produce.  Other vendors, ones selling antiques, DVDs, clothes, books, cleaning products, and kitchenware, also set up shop for the day.  Supermarkets like Tesco become irrelevant on the weekends, because one can get almost anything at the bazaar.

Not just produce at the farmers market.

I truly love these markets.  I often spend less than forty zloty and stagger away with tons of fresh fruits and vegetables.  With fall fast approaching and summer's grip withering, I find it's best to buy up as much cheap produce as I can now and preserve as much as I can.  Already, the kitchen is stacked with countless jars of strawberry and plum jam, plum wine brewing (I finished a batch of cherry wine), and I'm in the act of preserving tomatoes, onions, and potatoes.  I love fall, and everything it offers, but it does urge me to fill up my freezer with as much frozen freshness as I can.  Soon, the farmers will put away their stalls for the winter, and we'll all be forced to eat tasteless tomatoes, sad-looking lettuce, and unnaturally crisp apples.  But, the bright side is that all those wonderful tropical fruits will be hitting the shelves.

Wild mushrooms.

Nuts for sale.

Go Buy Some Flour

Why you should stock up on flour next time you go shopping.

We've all heard about the rampaging forest fires in Russia this summer.  They blanketed Moscow in dense, poisonous fog (doubling the death rate) and burned millions of acres.  What they also did was burn one third of Russia's wheat crop.  With Russia the fourth-largest producer of wheat in the world, you can bet that come harvest time, the prices are going to rise.  With the rise of wheat prices, naturally comes the rise in flour prices.  Prices are pretty low right now, so you ought to stock up.

Recently, every time I've gone out shopping I have bought a kilo or two of flour (usually tortowa typ 450 (cake flour, at 1.14zl), but luksusowa typ 550 is cheaper (1.03zl).  I now have around seven kilos flour, which will probably last me a month or two.  Due to my baking habits, I generally run through flour faster than most.  But, taking no chances, in order to preserve the extra flour and increase its longevity, I stash a couple of kilos in the freezer (to ward of creepy crawlies and bugs.)

Flour prices will not be the ones to rise; prices for wheat-based products (bread, prepared foods, confections, etc.) will probably rise as well.  As we all know, Poles are pretty passionate about their bread, so they might grumble if the prices rise a little too much.  The problem is that they can't be stored as long as flour can.  The rise in wheat will ripple through the agricultural sector, creating increases of varying sizes in places you might not expect.  It's not unlike an increase in oil prices.  When oil rises, it's not just gasoline and home heating prices that rise, but also things like: paving the roads (asphalt is made of petroleum), flight and bus tickets, food prices (cost of transportation), cosmetics, etc.
Of course, this is all speculation.  I hesitate to actually scream from the rooftops that flour may rise a couple grosze, or expect that anyone would care much.  A strengthening zloty would make up much of the difference (while a weakening zloty would make it worse.)  There might be bumper crops, not only in Poland, but also in Ukraine, the US, China, France, and Turkey.  Together, they might make up the difference and cancel it all out.  But, it doesn't hurt to be prepared.  It's more likely that the prices will rise rather than drop, so shell out a few extra zloty not to grab a couple extra kilos of flour.  It keeps a long time (if stored properly) and we're heading in to cooler weather, which will make storage all the more easier.

I make a mean sourdough out of this stuff.

How Leclerc, Tesco, and Lidl Almost Ruined My Easter

My plans for Easter were turned on their head when I was informed that I would be helping to host Easter Sunday's breakfast. This was a bit of a shock, but we went about organizing to put on a gig to leave none unimpressed. Various chores needed to be done for a successful execution: from a thorough cleaning to an acquisition and preparing of all the ingredients.

The meal was planned to be in two stages: the main breakfast and the serving of white borscht (bialy barszcz.) The main stage of the breakfast—brunch, really—was going to be injected with a little American flavor with additions such as deviled eggs, asparagus, and semi-eggs benedict. I say semi-eggs benedict because there is a lack of two key ingredients: Canadian bacon and English muffins (the bacon was substituted with Bekon Mistrza Jana, which looks like pretty much the same thing.) I decided upon the deviled eggs because I got a hankering for them, and the eggs benedict because that is what my family used to have for Easter breakfast (the asparagus was served for Easter dinner.) My brother—an apt chef—was masterful at making the hollandaise, but stressed how hard it was to make it correctly. The Polish portion of the breakfast included a chicken salad, a sledz (herring) salad, pisanki (Easter eggs)—including quail eggs, and various cold cuts. The święconka was situated on the table as decoration. While searching for a correct way to make hollandaise sauce, I went to the Wikipedia page for it and was inspired by the picture of asparagus and potatoes with hollandaise; thus, I added potatoes to the menu. It needed a starch anyway.

The second stage was dominated by bialy barszcz, with a cheese cake (sernik) for desert. The cheese cake alone called for fourteen eggs. This, added with the hard-boiled eggs for the barszcz, pisanki, and deviled eggs, plus the eggs for the hollandaise sauce and poached eggs, meant that we would be getting 5000% of our daily recommended intake of protein and cholesterol.

The plate of deviled eggs.

The potatoes, pisanki, poached eggs and bekon mistrza Jana, and the cold cuts spread with quail eggs (the quail eggs were made into pisanki before being peeled, hence the unnatural colors of the whites.)

While shopping for the meal, I spent hours fruitlessly looking for asparagus. Neither the massive stores of Leclerc (whose produce department usually sucks anyway), nor Tesco, nor even the venerable German Lidl had asparagus (why would these massive supermarkets have it? It's only a spring vegetable. Besides, they have plenty of space for apples and utterly tasteless tomatoes, neither of which are in season.) Lidl had jars of pickled white asparagus, and had the gall to be closed when I was frantically running around Easter Saturday afternoon (I been there earlier, on Holy Thursday.)

Tesco, which is supposed to be open twenty-four hours, was closing at 6PM, and there was a mad rush. Most of the produce was gone (see pictures below) and the lines were stacked. I got in one line, then moved to another. In the second line, a woman was checking out her goods and loading them into a pink backpack, but she looked awfully familiar. I could have sworn she was a student of mine from way-back when. As I walked to the subway, I passed her and blurted out, "Do I know you? Were you a student of mine?" She looked at me and a smile broke across her face. She was in fact, a former student of mine, and apparently I live on the same street as her parents. Small world, small city.

I carpeted the area, buying an unbelievable amount of eggs, but not finding a single stalk of asparagus! In a last resort, I went to the one open produce stall at a usual farmer's market, and pointedly asked if the proprietor had asparagus. And indeed he had! For the cost of 20zl per bunch. The asparagus (as I was to find out) was less than the freshest in spite the label that claimed to be the freshest. It was white asparagus, which I had never had, but I was overjoyed. The story ends well, with the hollandaise turning out OK, there being enough eggs to go around, and with me eating over half the asparagus myself (apparently the Poles are not the hugest fans of it.) The potatoes were a little over-boiled, but the poached egg and bekon combination was good enough for me. If the guests didn't like it, they didn't let it show.

The empty shelves of Tesco.

Nothing left of the promotions.

So, while these international megastores failed to provide the essential ingredient to the Easter breakfast, a single, brave soul, who was taking advantage that his competitors were home with their families, was able to sell me some overpriced, less-than-fresh asparagus. (The asparagus really tied the whole meal together.) Easter was saved, but not by whom you would think. It's just another one of those Easter miracles.

Oh, and we ate a crapload of eggs.

Solidarity's Dream

They have an unimaginable amount of huge malls here. They're not so much places to shop, as they are temples to Capitalism. (Actually, at the beginning of every fiscal year they sacrifice a real, live communist in hopes that the gods grant a bountiful year of wide profit margins.) These malls are gigantic, and they are everywhere. In Warsaw there are two malls that are directly across the street from each other, and most likely have the same stores. It's blows my mind that all these stores that sell all the same, overpriced shit can actually turn enough profit to stay open. Somehow they do.
Anyway, on the outskirts of Warsaw there's a mall in an old tractor factory, aptly called "Factory." The stores are only clothing stores, mostly catering to higher fashion, but they are also cheaper (more wholesale prices), but the stores are smaller and the mall is rather bare bones (crappy fluorescent lighting, concrete pad for a floor, no amenities like a food court or anything.) All the stores selling suits also had guys with (presumably) their girlfriends. Some seemed to be their mothers, but I don't think I saw a guy trying on a suit without asking the advice of some female companion. Clothes shopping is high on my list of torturous activities, and I cannot fathom why people find it relaxing or fun. A student of mine, a lady in her forties or fifties, said that she thought that shopping to women was like hunting for men. I thought this was really cool. Maybe not hunting, but still fulfilling the gatherer instinct. She, Barbara, described how it is to "hunt" for an outfit.