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stella41b -> RE: Dishes you really ought to know how to cook. (2/3/2010 11:35:14 PM)
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curry
leczo
bigos
spaghetti bolognaise
placik
Spaghetti bolognaise makes the list because if you have the meat, tomato sauce base and pasta you can add whatever else you like and people will still eat it. It's one of the few dishes which you really have to make an effort to cock up. One of my favourite variations contains wild mushrooms, Hungarian sweet peppers and a dash (or thereabouts) of a solid red wine such as a Hungarian Bear's Blood.
Three in my selection are pretty standard Eastern European dishes, placik, leczo and bigos. Placik as I understand it is a simple variation of pizza but instead of the tomato sauce and cheese you use spinach or mushrooms and it's best served with a chilled delicate white wine. Leczo is the Hungarian dish based on peppers and other similar vegetables, basically almost the same as ratatouille which I tend to serve with fresh crusty bread as a vegetarian alternative to spaghetti bolognaise.
And then there's the bigos, or 'hunter's stew' which is a mix of pickled and boiled cabbage with a spicy tomato sauce into which you can throw onions, wild mushrooms, cooked meats, bacon, and whatever else you wish. It's a traditional dish from when hunters would gather together in the forests around a large pot using melted snow as water and the hunters would throw in game and it would make for a nice communal meal.
It's since become the Polish national dish and the recipe varies from kitchen to kitchen and also depends on whatever is available. Indeed meat shops in Poland sell 'bigosowa' which are off-cuts of hams, bacon, sausages, etc which can be cut up and added to bigos. It's one of the first dishes I became used to when I was in Poland and got invited to dinner. From what I can remember (and some of it is hazy) you started out with a lot of bigos and small shots of vodka and then more people would turn up and the evening would usually progress to having a lot of vodka with small shots of bigos and someone with a guitar providing the music to songs everyone was singing to but only half the people knew the words to. It also caused one of my first misconceptions of Poland, and I can remember telling friends back in England that 'Poles are hard people, they drink vodka with their evening meal'.
Likewise I've also put curry on the list, because as long as you remember that you start with onions, the spices or paste and whatever you want to make a curry out of you can pretty much make a curry from anything, and, just like with bigos, all you need is a large pot, and also, just like bigos, it's a dish which can last for days, weeks even.
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