Gymnastics

Guess who went to the Olympics last Sunday? Yes, yes I did, thanks to a very generous friend. He invited me the gymnastic finals, which took place at the O2 instead of the more hyped-up Olympic Park. Good thing too, as being among hordes of people always drive me into slightly hyperventilate-y mode, and the O2 wasn't as crowded.(Fun fact - did you know that tickets to Olympics events cost around £1229857 each?)

It was everything I expected of an Olympic event. There was...Drama! Shocked gasps! Spandex! Sparkles! Extremely fit athletes! Lots of chalk dust! Duchess Kate!

And a very tall fish burger for lunch, as seen above. It was...unexciting. Also, a very well-dressed Japanese fan with a large sign covered in shiny red tinsel. Louis Smith may have got silver in the pommel horse, but he's a definite gold in the looks department (you have to imagine me saying that with a big pervy wink on my face). 

Christmas!

It's taken a while, but I'm finally getting round to posting photos of my Christmas feast. We decided to have it at home this time, and celebrated it on Christmas Eve with the delightful Miss Kitty Valentine, my cushion-making partner in crime Aldona and her family.

In true over-the-top Polish tradition, our dinner consisted of at least 12 dishes (since I'm not actually Polish, I don't know if it is true that a Polish Christmas dinner has to include 12 dishes, it's just what I've been told.) 

The coffee table had an array of sweets - (from top), homemade panforte, a quince, ginger and walnut cake based on this recipe, and some untraditionally shaped gingerbread biscuits (gingerbread T-rex, anyone?). Aldona also brought along some makowiec (poppyseed cake) and more biscuits.

The star of the night, a perfectly roasted goose! Manbacon (who can be partially seen behind the bird) cooked the goose himself, following a great recipe by the Hairy Bikers. He also managed to rustle up succulent salt beef, as well as plenty of delicious apple and pork stuffing. 

£10 notes to wipe our greasy hands and lips on, because we're hedonists and filthy rich. You can't see it, but we also had a stack of £20 and £50 note-napkins. 

Wild mushroom dumplings in beetroot soup (above), as well as some bigos, plenty of cured pork products, some marinated herrings, and possibly some other stuff as well. 

The aftermath - empty vodka bottles, half-finished bowls of soups and stews, burnt-out candles, crumpled napkins and wrapping paper, plenty of half-eaten food, and one stained tablecloth. Our guests were sent away with boxes stuffed full of food. 

Rusty Pencil Skirt

When I was in Poland this past summer, my mother-in-law decided to offload some fabric and asked me to pick out some that I thought I could use. This velvety soft needlecord was one of the ones I choose - I was  feeling ambitious and thought I would use it for a 'light autumnal jacket' but then of course I realised that I probably wouldn't be able to make it in time for cooler weather so shelved the idea for a bit. 

Feeling the need for a casual skirt recently, I set about looking through my stash and remembered the needlecord. I love corduroy skirts and trousers - as a teenager I owned a particularly soft pair of jeans in builders's-tea-brown that I could hardly bare to put in the wash, I loved it that much.

This skirt is basically a shortened version of my pencil skirt pattern - minus four inches at the hem, and with a thinner waistband. It has a lapped centre back metal zipper and a vintage plastic button to close the waistband. The short length also meant I didn't have to put in a vent at the back to help with walking. 

The skirt isn't lined, because I plan on wearing it even in the summer - it's definitely thin enough for that. However, I did try to make the insides extra special with some minty-green cotton bias binding around the raw edges and hem. I've become quite a fan of Hong Kong binding recently - it just seems to finish off items so prettily and it feels like a little present to yourself everytime you put on the skirt/dress/whatever. It's an immensely comfortable skirt  that will see quite a bit of wear from me. 

Jacket - found on street, blouse - Toast, skirt - selfmade, tights - supermarket, shoes - Converse, brooches - vintage

Eaten

Saltimbocca with mushroom sauce, and a side of cous cous. This was the first pretty meal I cooked in our new kitchen.

Prosciutto and Jarlsberg cheese sandwiches.

Possibly the worst cupcake ever! A complete waste of calories. It tasted very strongly of box-mix, and the frosting was curdled. It looks like scrambled eggs in this photo. I took a snap of it because it was so unusually horrible. Cupcake = Major Fail!

Easter Sunday brekkie: instant Polish fermented soup - Barszcz Biawy - sounds gross, but it's actually delicious. With hardboiled  eggs and tinned hotdogs because we didn't have any Polish sausages. It's supposed to be a Polish Easter tradition to eat this on Easter morning.

Fried patties of minced pork, buckwheat, capsicums, and onions, served with a mushroom and red wine sauce. The Mancreature made this.

Pear, walnut and ginger cake. Recipe coming very soon.

Bigos And Banana Bread Baking Bonanza

No, not bigos-banana bread - because that would be disgusting. At least, I think it would, but I haven't actually tried that combination yet, so who knows, eh? What I actually baked this past Sunday evening were bigos and cheese muffins, and a banana loaf.

The banana loaf was inspired by Loumm's tempting banana, cinnamon and walnut loaf recipe. I substituted some coffee for the milk used in the original recipe, and used some mixed nuts instead of just walnuts - the whole thing came out delicious, if I do say so myself.

The bigos muffins, on the other hand, came about as an answer to the question "Where else can I hide some bigos?"

That Manpoppet of mine was gripped by an insatiable craving for massive amounts of hunters' stew on the weekend, and cooked up a great big monster of stewed cabbages and meats on Saturday. I'm not exaggerating when I call it a 'great big monster' - that baby weighed about 5kgs!

Faced with the terrifying thought of eating only bigos for the next fortnight, I had a quick look around the kitchen, and whipped up some of this little muffin monsters.

Ingredients

350 gm plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate soda

1 tsp baking powder

100 gm butter

300 ml milk

1 egg, beaten

300 gm bigos

200 gm grated cheese

Directions

Makes about 12 medium muffins.

- Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

- Sift flour into a mixing bowl, then rub butter into flour.

- Mix milk and egg into flour mixture.

- Using a wooden spoon or spatula, mix in the bigos and grated cheese. I used Edam as it was the only one I had in my fridge at the time, but it would be interesting to try some softer ones like mozzarella or even Brie in the future.

- Spoon the mixture into a lightly greased muffin tray. You can fill them all the way to the top, as the mixture doesn't rise too much during baking.

- Bake in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes. Stick a skewer through the middle of a muffin (or a butter knife if you're like me and aren't organised enough to have skewers), they're done when the skewer comes out clean. There may be some melted cheese clinging on to the skewer though, so as long as there's no floury stuff clinging to your skewer, you're good to go!

* Bigos - we made ours, but you can find them in jars at supermarkets and Polish grocers. So, there's no need for you to go to all that trouble making 5kg of stew just to make these muffins.

Christmas Colours

Christmas celebrations invariably involve eating your own body weight through a mountain of food, and I certainly did my part this year. Christmas Eve dinner was held at A+B's cosy flat in East London, where we proceeded to slowly but steadily work our way through a 12-course Polish dinner. The Mancreature tells me that it's traditional for Polish families to stuff their faces with 12 different dishes during Christmas dinner, so we took that as an excuse to eat til we nearly threw up.

I made up a tower of quince pies and lots of little Russian tea cakes to add to the party, while the Mancreature made little dumplings called uzska - little ears - and also roasted a great big hunk of beef. Turns out we needn't have brought those items, as there was more than enough food awaiting our rather late entrance.

We stuffed our greedy maws with plenty of pierogi, beetroot soup, bigos, marinated herrings, lots of sausages  and at least  four different cakes. In fact, there was so much food that we ended up having to take a half hour break halfway through the meal before we could go on and finish all 12 dishes. The Mancreature nearly ended up in a coma at the end of it, but that's because he didn't listen to my advice - just keep eating, and don't listen to your gut!

I know I'd promised to write up my recipe for quince pies before, but you'll just have to wait a little longer before I get round to doing it. I used this recipe for the biscuits, but omitted the icing sugar dusting and got creative with some chocolate-flavoured icing instead. It's currently one of my favourite biscuit recipes, as it takes hardly any time to mix up, and I've also discovered that the resulting biscuits keep fairly well too.

The next day - Christmas Day - was spent lazing around in our pyjamas, playing computer games and making more mushroom-filled uszkas! This time, I had the 'brilliant' idea of adding red and green food colouring to the dough, to produce a batch of Christmas-coloured dumplings. They looked like little embryos, but were so tasty right out of a hot water bath, with a little lot of butter slathered over them.  Lots of things taste great covered in butter...I love butter!

We didn't make them to a specific recipe, but you if'd like to try them out, here's a fairly simple one. Ours were stuffed with wild Polish mushrooms and onions, but I don't see why you can't stuff them with other ingredients if you feel like it. Once you've cooked them, you can keep them for a couple of days in the fridge, although we finished ours almost immediately. All 52 little ears.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all have a great 2010!

Cake-ztravaganza!

Battle of the Eastern European cakes

Twas my birthday this past Sunday, and lo and behold, the heavens presented me with not one, but TWO birthday cakes! And if you've met me before, you'll know I love cake. I wuff cake!

That's the second year in a row that I've ended up with two cakes in a day for my birthday. Does that make it a tradition now? I hope it does, it's an awesome tradition!

Cake no. 1 by my housemate Emese. Just chillin' in the fridge, ya know, hanging out...
It was supposed to be a surprise but The Man let it slip the day before that she was making me a cake, so I had to put my 'oh, what a surprise!' face on.

Cake no. 2 aka 'The Monster'. The Man made this...with a recipe from a Polish website. He kept calling it a 'torte'. But then I told him it was pretty much like a Black Forest cake...and he still kept calling it a 'torte' but I think it became known as a Black Forest torte thereafter. The white layers are there because we ran out of cocoa powder. And also coz we believe in racial integration. (Integration now! Segregation never!)

It weighed as much as a new-born baby and I just had the last slice for breakfast. Is that why my tummy hurts now?

Before demolition

Look how much cake no. 2 towers over cake no. 1. It tries to intimidate with sheer bulk!

Halfway through demolition

For your consideration - I had two helpings of cake-age. That's how tuff I am. Don't mess, mofo.