Maciej ("Ski") Skierkowski

I’ve made Eggs Benedict numerous times before, but usually I fake the eggs. I typically just fry the eggs on the pan sunny-side up… I guess it’s not really Eggs Benedict but rather a sandwich with eggs, ham and Hollandaise sauce. This morning I wanted to make some real Eggs Benedict with real poached eggs and home made hollandaise sauce.

I followed the directions from “How to Poach an Egg” on wkiHow, and it worked like a charm on the first try.

For the Hollandaise Sauce I just used the recipe from the Food Network, though I guess I should have just looked into The Complete Robuchon.

Made these last week; the day after making the blueberry pierogi. These came out amazing. I don’t remember the last time I had fresh home made pierogi (probably last Christmas when I was visiting family in Poland) so this definitely hit the spot.

I think this is the filling that is most popular in the US. This is just made with potatoes, onion and a little bit of cream cheese, and then after it is boiled it is pan fried with some bacon fat.

This little appetizer was a labor of love. It is a twist on the standard beets & goat cheese salad. Just about all the ingredients are all organic and locally grown and purchased at the local farmer’s markets. Thanks of course to Becky since I got some of these ingredients from her market.

So this is the “Napoleon Beets”. The beets themselves were boiled and then after cooling I carefully scraped them to not break of the cute hat. They are stacked with layers of goat cheese.

The red sauce, is not ketchup, despite looking that way. It is a very simple sauce made with raspberry wine (I got that from Becky and it is made by her farm), some olive oil, and butter. The Butter actually still had some sugar in it from the candied pecans. You can only see the walnuts in the picture with they yellow beats. I added a little bit of corn starch to make it a bit more viscous.

The green sauce is a combination of pulverized and strained chives mixed with olive oil. I added some of the chives back into the sauce to give it more color.

The pecans are just pecans mixed with sugar and butter. I friend them on the pan and then used the remaining butter and sugar to make the red sauce.

Brine is water saturated or nearly saturated with a salt (usually sodium chloride). It is used to preserve vegetables, fish, and meat, in a process known as brining (now less popular than historically).

Pickles (pickled cucumber) can be pickled in brine or they can be pickled in vinegar; however, vinegar is far more common.

A few weeks ago I was making Polish dill pickle soup which calls for pickles made in brine, as opposed to vinegar, and found it nearly impossible to find. I actually had to go to a Polish market to find this stuff.

I might not be making pickle soup any time soon; however, the pickles made in brine are delicious. So this time instead of hunting them down in the store I am making some from my moms recipe made with cucumbers I purchased at the Bainbridge farmers market.

It’s simple. You add 2 tbl spoons of salt for every liter of water. When the water is lukewarm, you add the cucumber 3-5 cloves of garlic, a few stalks of dill and some horseradish root. The markets were out of horseradish root, so instead I used a Red German garlic, which is a spicier type of garlic. In a few weeks I should have some tasty homemade pickles in brine.

Cooking as often as I do this might actually be one of very few times I made eggs sunny side up. They were delicious. I am still looking for non-industrialized eggs, that have the orange yolk (like eggs are supposed to have), as opposed to that pale yellow color. Unfortunately my farmers market only had duck eggs today.

Eggs and toast

Today Michelle and I made some strawberry jam with the strawberries we got at the Capitol Hill Farmers Market. Making jam is strait forward, we boiled the strawberries and added some sugar. The sugar makes it sweet but it also helps the jam set. To our surprise we really didn’t need to add the sugar for sweetness; after boiling the strawberries the flavor and sweetness was already concentrated. I added some lemon juice to it as I didn’t add any pectin to help it set. Some fruits actually have a lot of pectin naturally so they make a more jelly like substance, especially the citrus fruit, but not strawberries.

Michelle and I literally spent all day cooking. In the early afternoon we made the strawberry jam and the Pickles, then for dinner I made beets, ham steak with potatoes. While doing all this I was ruthlessly blogging about it. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty nerdy.

Anyway, we made traditional sweet/dessert styled blueberry pierogi. If you do not know what it is, here is a little blurb on wikipedia about Polish Pierogi.

The dough is a strait forward recipe made with flour, little bit of oil, one egg, water, milk, and salt. None of the ingredients are measured out, it’s all measured by eye. Let me tell you, it’s damn difficult to try to get a recipe from a Polish parent over the phone.

The blueberries are just plain old blueberries we picked up this morning at the Cap Hill farmers market. We added a tiny bit of sugar to them, and that’s it.