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We bid summer farewell as we do each year with an end-of-the-summer BBQ with friends. The friends on the guest list change from year to year, but the venue stays the same – our barn. We talked about how we spent the summer and our plans for the upcoming school year. Then we played with their drone and went to a party at the village świetlica to eat some cake and dance to some Coco Jumbo.
Although we’re excited to start another school year (Lizzie is in 3rd grade and Rosie starts 1st grade), we are sad to say goodbye to summer. It seemed shorter this year. I guess my age is showing.
Farewell rainbows after a summer rain.

Goodbye grain in the field.


So long yard work and rhubarb with sugar.


See you later fun-in-the-sun.

Bye-bye burgers from the grill

No more  hot-air-balloon surprises on the drive home.

An end to summer festivals.

The last of the fresh blueberry muffins.

The final summer BBQ’s with friends.








Hello new school year. It’s going to be a great one!

Fingers crossed and thumbs held

The exterminators were here a week ago. We are a couple of thousand zloty poorer and our house smells like chemicals, but fingers crossed and thumbs held*, let’s hope that it works. To recap, our house in the village has woodworm. The woodworm is eating away at the beams which support the whole structure. I cannot use past tense yet.
The most effective treatment would have been gassing the whole house. This is the solution that I pushed for, but the exterminators were worried about the proximity of the next door neighbors. Strictly according to the law, their house is far enough away but our neighbors are old and like to wander into our garden in our absence, so the exterminator was worried about their overall safety.
The next best method is to drill holes into all the wooden beams, inject them with a poisonous resin, and re-impregnate all wood in the house. It looks like this:

Luckily for us, our beams are exposed. If not, the ceilings would have had to be removed. This process isn’t an instant kill of the woodworm. Any worms die upon reaching the resin and if any make their way out, they will most likely not re-infect due to the impregnation. In one particular beam that showed no signs of infestation, the worms were clearly crunching away. Now all sounds in that beam have stopped. In other places, I can still hear them. It’s quite unsettling.
Additionally, the extermination team gave the barn a spray. The chemicals are available over-the-counter, so to speak, but I am not comfortable using toxic substances myself. They had all the protective clothing and masks and a power sprayer thingy so it was much better that they did it and we just paid for it.
I hope that'll be the end of the woodworm story.
Do you feel itchy?

*Polish equivalent to crossing your fingers for good luck.

Inside and Out

I cannot concentrate on anything. Inside the house we are fighting an epic battle with korniki or some other kind of woodworm which is attacking our wood-framed house. If I were a religious person, I just might cross myself before climbing into the bathtub full of water upstairs. That’s 100 kilos of bathtub, plus water, plus me supported by wooden beams. As it is, I never sit on the couch located downstairs under the tub when somebody is having a bath.
Outside, pokrzywa is attacking us from every front. Yes, I know that stinging nettle is not really a weed, that you can make soup from it and that is has other medicinal uses, but I don’t really care. It is ugly and it has taken over all border areas of the yard and a good-sized patch in the back garden.
Of these two szkodniki I am more concerned by the woodworm. We are planning the next stage of attack this weekend. Fingers-crossed and thumbs held.

Kids and life and stuff

Here’s how our village celebrated Children’s Day – a “bajkowe” welcome in the morning followed by a sport’s day at school.





Here’s how we celebrated – homemade chocolate chip cookies.

And to continue the American theme – hamburgers!

Our village is getting hooked up to the sewage system. Our street was on the schedule for today, and here are the men hard at work. If our kids didn’t know the “k”-word before, they certainly know it now. Plus you can see the lovely flowers Misiu picked for me when we stopped the car for Rosie to throw up.

A bit of rain plus a rainbow to make our day.

Kids catching some sun after being mercilessly sprayed with the hose.

And on a patriotic note, we bought a new TV, a Polish one of course. Woohoo.

Just a few more weeks of school and then bring on the summer!

Christmas in the Village

We spent Christmas at our village house for the first time ever. It was fantastic. Rosie kept saying “this is our prawdziwy dom”. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. We were able to spend Christmas at our house this year because we installed gas heating which was finished just a few days before Christmas. For future reference - when the gas company tells you that it only takes a month or two to do all the paperwork and install everything, please know that they are exaggerating at best or just plain lying at worst.  

We had a real tree and put it up in the girls’ room. That’s when I discovered that lights for a little apartment-tree are not enough for a big house-tree. Oh well, better luck next year. I also discovered that it is hard to play Santa Claus in the room where children are sleeping, but I managed to do it somehow. The top hit this year was Baby Alive for Rosie and Lego City for Lizzie. They were also thrilled with their room and the house and spending time together. So were we.

The girls made some decorations for the tree. I love them! It’s my Christmas 2011 “favorite thing”.

 

 

I cooked the usual - kutia, herrings and this year pork roast with prunes.

Here are all the ingredients for kutia. Recipe after the pictures.

Here’s the wheat after it is cooked…

 

…and after all the ingredients have been added.

Mmmm…kutia.

Kutia Recipe

“kutia” wheat -whole grains

raisins

honey

nuts of your choice

poppy seeds

candied orange peel

cream at least 18%

Soak the wheat overnight. Boil in a large pot until the wheat softens. Depending on the brand of wheat, it can take from 1 hour to as long as 3. Drain and rinse the wheat.

Mix the cooked wheat, honey (to taste – I use about 6 teaspoons for one bag of wheat), raisins, chopped nuts (I use walnuts and sometimes almonds), poppy and candied orange peel (I used canned and prepared poppy seeds) and a couple of tablespoons of cream.

Kutia Przepis

pszenica na kutię – całe ziarna

rodzynki

miód

orzechy – do wyboru

mak

kandyzowana skórka z pomarańczy

śmietanka – co najmniej 18%

Mocz pszenicę w wodzie przez noc. Gotuj w dużym garnku aż zmięknie. W zależności od rodzaju ziarna może to zająć od 1 do 3 godzin. Odcedź i wypłucz pszenicę.

Wymieszaj ugotowaną pszenicę, miód (żeby był smak ja używam około 6 łyżeczek na jeden woreczek pszenicy), rodzynki, posiekane orzechy (ja używam włoskie a czasami migdały), mak i skórkę pomarańczy (używam maku gotowego z puszki) i kilka łyżek stołowych śmietanki .

I can say that after all these years in Poland, I even like herrings – as long as I prepare them myself. My favorite way to prepare herrings is with onions.

Herrings with onions

8-10 herring filets matias (as we call them “majtasy”). If they are salted they need to be rinsed or even soaked and rinsed in water or milk. Drain and pat dry. Set aside.

Slice an onion or two very thinly. Place on a plate and sprinkle with sugar. Allow the onions to sit until they start to get soft and release some juice (at least an hour). Layer the fish and onions in a bowl. Sprinkle each layer with a little white wine vinegar and drizzle with some olive oil. Allow to sit at least 12 hours. Decorate with parsley and lime.

Śledzie z cebulą

8-10 filetów śledziowych tzw. MATJASY (my mówimy na nie MAJTASY). Jeśli są posolone trzeba je wypłukać lub nawet namoczyć w wodzie lub w mleku i wypłukać. Odcedzić i wysuszyć. Odłożyć na bok.

Potnij w cienkie plasterki 1 lub 2 cebule. Połóż na talerzu i posyp cukrem. Pozostaw cebulę aż zmięknie i puści sok (co najmniej 1 godzina). Ułóż warstwami rybę i cebulę na półmisku. Pokrop każdą warstwę odrobiną octu winnego i polej odrobiną oliwy z oliwek. Pozostaw na co najmniej 12 godzin. Udekoruj natką pietruszki i limonką.

 

I also prepared a herring salad with potatoes, beets, onions, pickles, apples, herring (of course) and mayo but it wasn’t as good as the plain herrings with onions.

I thought that my biggest challenge would be the schab ze śliwkami but in fact it was the easiest. I was most worried about how I would make the hole in the roast for the prunes but our butcher read my mind and asked me if I needed a hole punched through the meat. Problem solved.

Before…

… and after.

Our Christmas Eve supper  - pierogi and uszka courtesy of my mother-in-law

From the sofa I could admire our heater (yippee) and the Christmas decorations on our neighbor’s roof. We don’t have curtains as you can see. It makes things interesting ;)

Here’s some mistletoe from our garden that I hung in the kitchen. I stood under it for ages with no results. Maybe next time.

Some carolers came to our door but while I was looking for my wallet, they left. Impatient little carolers. I also saw my favorite neighborhood pijaki visiting the shop owner at home on Boxing Day begging him to take pity on them and open the shop just for a minute so they could buy a flaszka. The shop owner declined to open the shop. Good for him!

One more favorite thing of Christmas 2011 is the fact that we are mortgage free. We paid the last mortgage payment for our apartment (our house has been paid for awhile) and are now mortgage free. Yippee!

Shopping Madness

I have experienced the shopping madness which is IKEA Saturday morning one week before Christmas. Normally, I wouldn’t even go to IKEA on a normal weekend but circumstances were such that we had to go today. What circumstances could possibly get me into a shopping mall a week before Christmas (‘cause we all know how I love to shop)?

Well, the circumstances are that our heat installer czyli plumber is finishing our central heating today and we will be able (knock on wood) to spend a warm and toasty Christmas at our dacha this year. And seeing as Christmas Eve is next Saturday and we don’t have any (well, almost any) furniture in our house and we don’t have any days off next week, well, you see why we had to go to shopping for furniture today.

Luckily, I planned ahead and thank goodness I did because it was a mad house…and we had to take the girls with us. Bless their little hearts, they were so well-behaved. First we stopped at JYSK – just as crowded as IKEA, but with only one cashier – to buy a trundle bed for the girls. Then off to IKEA for some more furniture. Chamstwo nie było. I made a list ahead of time which you can do from the catalog or better yet print out online and we shopped terminator style –locate and hit- throughout the whole store. There were plenty of helpful shop assistants. The lines at the check-out weren’t too bad. The bill was pretty high though - it was very Lisbeth of me.

Surprisingly, we didn’t see anybody we knew except for one employee of IKEA (Misiu used to teach English at IKEA). We usually see somebody we know no matter where we go – I even ran into an old school friend on the subway in NYC once. I suppose anybody I know would have more sense than to go to IKEA a week before Christmas.

Now all that is left is to clean our housek (blah), put all the furniture together (blah) and do the grocery shopping (don’t worry, I have a list). I bought the children’s presents 2 weeks ago so they only need to be wrapped (oh, wrapping paper) and put under the tree. THE TREE! That’s another thing to take care of…

Just an aside, this year my girls are pretty much getting everything on their Christmas lists. Now, just wait a minute, I am not spoiling them. They just have incredibly short Christmas lists. Why? Because they think you can only get one thing for Christmas. Finding all their gifts (well, except for one thing from each of their lists – I have to leave something for their birthdays) took some doing. And let me just say this – for name brand toys SMYK is a rip-off. Baby Alive, Rosie’s dream doll, costs 299.98 at SMYK and I got it for 148.99 at Auchan – in the same mall. The same goes for Legos. SMYK does, however, have nice “Smyk” brand toys for a reasonable price.

Of course, I spoke too soon. Misiu just called to say the heat isn’t finished (it’s almost finished) and the plumber isn’t answering his phone. It can’t be worse than our last plumber who made a huge hole in the wall and then killed himself, God rest his soul. Heat or no heat, we are blessed.