Guest Blog: Happy New Year!

Warsaw is really not like this every day. But this is pretty hefty gray, no? That security man is keeping slush from killing people on the sidewalk below. Kind of a fun job, I think.

Meredith entices me to Taiwan with these new year's sausages. They look so ... much like fireworks! Who wouldn't want to try them?


I guess this man. He looks kind of done with the whole selling of the sausage. Maybe he and I need to do a cultural exchange:

Tłusty Czwartek

After spending my morning brushing up my Polish (that's how I spend many mornings) last Thursday, I headed off for my usual pre-reading ritual: good coffee. Lo and behold, as I trudged through the snow -- seriously, so much snow has been falling -- I saw a crowd of people. Even though I knew who they were and why they didn't mind hovering in the wet snow for hours, I was surprised at how long the queue was on ulica Chmielna:

Obviously, they're all waiting for fresh pączki (also known as Krapfen, Berliner, or just plain old jelly-filled) on the last Thursday before lent. Fat Thursday! This place on Chmielna (thanks, Greg, for the hat-tip) has the freshest and best in Warsaw. So fresh that they can't be kind when they serve you. No matter: delicious!! And everyone here thought a minimum two hour wait was critical to their pre-Lenten parties. I waited forty five minutes before deciding that I wasn't that picky about my donuts, unless it's the cake doughnuts in Ball Square at Lyndell's, which are obviously the only ones I'll eat in the greater Boston area.

Then I went and had my coffee and this nice, very adequate, but not earth-shattering pączek:

Guest Sausage: Cassoulet from St. Paul!

Even though I'm simmering sausage (veal + pork) in vermouth as I write this, I've not been eating much sausage of late. It would be tasty in the winter, and it is tasty in the winter. So I don't know what I've been up to, making soup without browned sausage. But Ben and Glenda are saving me from shame by providing what looks like an amazingly delicious cassoulet (let's be honest, it's a casserole. It just definitely doesn't have Fritos sprinkled on top!) for your wurst pleasure. Here we go!



Glenda writes: "Cassoulet is a traditional French dish, basically a bean and pork stew that takes three days to make and tastes like ... magic. Succulent tender sausage and duck confit, creamy beans, a crisp crust made from bread crumbs -- perfection! Following a recipe in Cooks Illustrated, we made it in four and a half hours instead of three days, and were delighted with our creation. The beans were deliciously smooth after soaking overnight in salt water (their skin shrank at first, making me afraid we'd already ruined the meal! By the morning the beans had calmed down and their skin was smooth again. Whew!). We cooked the beans with salt pork and bratwurst, which is the best substitution for fancy French sausage that we couldn't get/afford in Minnesota. Having never worked with uncooked sausage before, it was something of an adventure to cook them, especially since they were sooo slippery and weirdly water-logged after we parboiled them.
In what some may think is a sacrilegious move, we didn't include confit, because learning how to make one thing at a time seemed like a good idea. Also, the salt pork was also an experience, but not sausage related so I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say, it is sort of icky.
Finally, crucial to our success was the new Dutch oven we bought just for this dish. Thank you, Dutch oven!"