My grandfather (who passed away a few years ago) was Polish, and this year my grandmother (who is Scots-Irish and claims that she never actually even liked kielbasa) requested a Polish dinner for the family Christmas celebration.
Besides kielbasa, which we would have had anyway (honestly, if for some reason we were having Chinese for a family dinner, we'd still have kielbasa), mom is making golabki (stuffed cabbage), my sister is bringing pierogies, and I'm making mizeria.
What that means is, I got off easy. Mizeria is just cucumbers in sour cream.
I also had to make the not-particularly-Polish key lime pie and some appetizers. Feeling a bit guilty about the mizeria, I decided to see if I could come up with something Polish that didn't involve herring.
I made some vegetable pates (recipes to follow if they go over ok, otherwise we'll just pretend that never happened) and a potato cracker with caraway seeds called paluszki:
3 sticks of butter, softened
2 medium potatoes, cooked and mashed (345 g)
450 grams flour (this was adapted from a Polish recipe, so the ingredients were given by weight, and metric at that. I have a scale, so I did actually weight stuff out. It was about 3 3/4 cups of flour)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg, beaten
Caraway seeds (lots)
Preheat the oven to 425 (farenheit. I had to convert from centigrade, but I won't make you do the math.)
Put the butter and potato in a large bowl, then sift in the flour and salt. (Yeah, I object to sifting, but I didn't want to play too fast and loose with the recipe, since it's a new one.) Mix to a soft dough. I used my hands. This is a very un-Nic-like recipe, by the way.
Turn the dough out onto a "lightly-floured surface" and knead for a few seconds or until smooth. (The recipe said a few seconds...I'm guessing it could also mean "a few kneads." Here is where I got nervous that I was overworking the dough. I don't know what it means to overwork dough, but I'm pretty sure it's bad.)
Cover and chill for 30 minutes. Have a pivo. (Just seeing if you speak Polish, though I was talking about the dough in the first part.)
Roll the dough out on that "light-floured surface" again, and roll to about 8 mm thick. (I had some real quality control issues with my thickness, and for the most part mine were not that thick. I am used to rolling the chrusciki, which springs back on you and you're supposed to be able to read through.)
Cut the dough into strips. Again, I was thinking 1. chrusciki and 2. I'm serving these as crackers. After I was done and went back to the original recipe, I saw that the paluszki supposedly means "little fingers," and the strips are supposed to be about finger-sized. Oh well.
Put the strips on a well-oiled (lots and lots of Pam, in my case) baking sheet, brush with the beaten egg, and sprinkle with caraway seeds. Don't skimp on the seeds; that seems to be where most of the flavor comes from.
Bake until lightly browned, about 12 minutes...9 or 10 if you roll them out too thin, as I did. But that does get it finished faster!
Cool on a wire rack (and they cool faster if you make them too thin, too). The way I cut them, cracker-sized, this made about a 9x13 baking-pan full.
I tested a few of the uglier ones (ragged edges, too thin), and they are kinda tasty, if you like caraway. I'm hoping they will go well with the mushroom pate, and with my great-aunt's authentic Polish beet relish, which from what I understand involves jarred pickled beets and jarred horseradish. To which I say: Go, Prastryjenka ["great-aunt" in Polish, I think]! I knew I had to have inherited my cooking inclinations from somebody.
* The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas is actually a song on a Veggie Tales album; my niece and nephews find it hysterical. I can't find the lyrics, but it does address the fact that many many Polish foods involve meat.