My Traveling Joys

Friday, January 3, 2014

A Very Merry Christmas Market in Krakow

1/03/2014 05:45:00 AM by Joy4 comments

With an imposing, 14^th-century gothic church nearby, horse-drawn carriages and a historical market square, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect place for a Christmas market.

The Main Market Square, called the Rynek Glówny, in Krakow offers an impressive backdrop for a Christmas market. On Sunday, after a 3-hour train ride from Warsaw, we arrived at the market with our visiting friends. Lucky for us, the market, which traditionally starts the last week of November, stayed open until Dec. 31. this year.

I couldn’t wait to explore the market!

St. Mary's Church, re-built in the 14th century (originally built in the early 13th century), dominates Krakow's Main Market Square.

The scent of sizzling fat Polish sausages immediately hit my senses. Several busy stalls sold all kinds of delicious pork products such grilled kielbasa, various sausages, sauerkraut cooked with porky-goodness bits and a smaller form of Poland’s national dish of golonka (roasted ham hock). And dear readers, you know how much I love pork!

While the guys ordered grilled kielbasa for us, I wandered over to a stall selling Hungarian lángos (a deep-fried flat bread made of a potato-based dough) – the same ones I had eaten at the Great Market Hall in Budapest. Later on, we were tempted not just once, but four times by the grilled oscypek, a smoky, salty sheep’s milk cheese from the Tatra mountains. This warm cheese is particularly tasty with a dollop of tangy cranberry compote.

After our bellies were full, we continued to warm up our bodies with Poland’s mulled wine, which was sold from dozens of giant barrels with medieval lettering reading: “GRZANIEC.”

Krakow’s Christmas market also offered about 40 rustic wooden stalls selling the folk art and handicraft items that were plainly missing from the markets we recently visited in Copenhagen. We found traditional Polish pottery, embroidered tablecloths, metalwork, hand-carved spoons, Nativity scenes and bowls, stained glass Christmas ornaments, wooden swords for children, handmade candles, woolen slippers and hats and jewelry as well as gingerbread cookies from Toruń and other sweets. If you're looking for a particular folk craft or decoration, you certainly will find it here!

Our friends were delighted to explore this Christmas market as well as the stalls inside the historic Cloth Hall with us.

Christmas lights inside Krakow's Cloth Hall market.

When we tired of shopping, we roamed Krakow’s cobblestone streets and visited numerous beautiful churches. Did you know that Krakow trails just behind Rome with its abundances of churches per square mile? In fact, in the Middle Ages, Krakow was known as “Small Rome” for its many churches, according to our Rick Steves’ guidebook. (I’ll try to share some of my church photos soon.)

This was our third trip to Krakow, and I’m betting it won’t be our last. Visiting this festive Christmas market certainly cinched that deal!

Cobblestone streets decorated with Christmas lights in Krakow, Poland.

Ringing in 2014 in Warsaw with New & Old Friends

1/01/2014 09:41:00 AM by Joy6 comments

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you had a fantastic New Year’s celebration!

Here in Warsaw, we rung in the new year at home with my longtime friend, Becca, and her husband, who are visiting us from the U.S. We’ve known each other for more than 12 years and have stayed in touch through all of our many moves in the U.S. and abroad. I feel blessed to have good friends like this! We also celebrated the festivities with our new Hungarian friends – one of the best parts of our expat life – meeting new friends.

Good friends - Becca and me at home in Warsaw.

Our home was filled with good food, which included a full-sit down dinner with a creamy celery root soup with truffled croutons, herb-crusted beef tenderloin, au gratin potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts and a berry topped New York Cheesecake (In Poland, you can substitute serek smietankowy for the labne.) Luckily, I had three prep cooks in the kitchen with me to help with this amazing meal!

New York cheesecake topped with a mixed berry compote. I made the compote with some of my frozen cherries, strawberries and blueberries (leftover from the summer bounty), a bit of sugar and orange juice.

Of course, hubby was our drink mixologist and whipped up a batch of these pomegranate margaritas, which we like to refer to as Nar-garitas. This drink is the perfect reminder of our love for Istanbul. In fact, these pomegranates had labels on them saying they were from Turkey! I seem to find a bit of Turkey now wherever we go.

A variety of drinks followed after our Nar-garitas, which may explain why some of us are feeling a bit rough this morning, as well as an evening filled with dancing to some of my favorite 80s tunes and dance music. What a fun evening!

Finally, Warsaw did not disappoint us and displayed a multitude of fireworks in the sky throughout the evening, concluding with a fabulous explosion at midnight. We had the perfect view from our balcony and could run inside when we got too cold.

I’m a little relieved to put 2013 behind us as it was a tough year. I moved from a city I loved and had to start all over again. Such is the life as an expat! I’m eagerly looking forward to a fun-filled 2014 and settling down in our new city.

Happy New Year my friends! May 2014 be filled with new adventures, good food and terrific travels!

As always, thanks for reading!

We had a fantastic view of the fireworks over Warsaw!

Swedish Gingerbread Cookies for the Holidays

12/27/2013 05:10:00 AM by Joy8 comments

Well Christmas may be over, but my kitchen is still full of leftover cookies.

I meant to share my recipe for the decorated snowflakes the other day, but we spent 3 days just relaxing, cooking at home and enjoying the holidays together. I hope you, dear readers, also got to spend time with your loved ones.

So, this belated recipe is for my friend’s Swedish Gingerbread Cookies. My friend, Connie, has lived in Istanbul for 40-plus years since she is married to a Turk, and they made the city their home. She is a wonderful baker and cook and happily shared this recipe with me when we lived in the same city.

If you love gingerbread cookies, this is one recipe you’ll definitely want to save for next year’s holiday baking. The only problem is that the recipe makes a LOT of cookies. My batch yielded 132 cookies at last count. Of course, it depends on what size of cookie cutter you use too.

The more cookies you have, the more you have to share!

Besides snowflakes, I also decorated some Christmas trees and poinsettias with Royal Icing.

We have friends arriving from the U.S. this afternoon, so we’ll be showing them around Warsaw, introducing them to Polish vodka and ringing in the new year together. Hopefully, they will help eat my cookies too!

Happy holidays wherever you may be!

Swedish Gingerbread Cookies

Yields: about 150 cookies.

2 ¼ cup (490 g.) granulated sugar

5 oz. (150 ml.) water

3 oz. (100 g.) molasses (Polish: melasa trzcinowa or Turkish: üzüm pekmezi)**

1 ¼ Tablespoons ground cinnamon

1 ½ teaspoons ground cloves

1 Tablespoons ground ginger

_________________________________________________

10 oz. (285 g.) butter, room temperature

1 Tablespoons cognac or brandy

2 ¼ teaspoons baking soda

6 cups (1000 g.) all-purpose flour or 480 typ Szymanowska Polish flour

In a large bowl placed over a simmering pot to create a bain marie, add the sugar, water spices and molasses into the bowl. Heat until the sugar dissolves, stirring often with a spoon. This will take about 10 minutes.

Remove the bowl from the heat. Stir in the butter.

Next, mix the baking soda with the cognac. Pour this mixture into the molasses mixture.

When the ingredients have cooled to room temperature, add in the flour. The dough will be very thick at this point so I donned some plastic gloves and ended up “kneading” the dough a bit until all the flour was worked in.

Separate the dough into five or six pieces. Flatten the dough into small square packets about 1-inch thick. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest about an hour.

Then, on a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough very thin. Cut out various shapes and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper.

Bake at 350F/175C for about 10 minutes, until slightly browned on the edges.

You can re-roll your dough scraps to make more cookies.

Once cool, decorate your cookies with my Royal Icing recipe, candies and sugar sprinkles.

**Note: Molasses seems to be difficult to find here in Poland. I found my molasses at the Organic Farma stores here in Warsaw.

Merry Christmas from Warsaw

12/25/2013 05:34:00 AM by Joy5 comments

Our apartment is beginning to smell a lot like Christmas!

This morning, I’m baking a tray of my Grandmother’s Lebkuchen Bars, which is an annual holiday tradition. As soon as I smell the anisette-flavored bars baking, they remind me of Christmases past and my long-gone grandmother. No matter where I live – NYC, Istanbul or Warsaw – baking my grandmother’s bars is one Christmas tradition I always plan to do.

Last night, hubby and I took a stroll through Warsaw’s Old Town so we could admire the Christmas lights together. Every store was shuttered and very few people were out since Christmas Eve (Wigilia) is the most important Christmas holiday celebrated with family in Poland. I’ve never seen the Old Town that quiet.

The city does a fantastic job with its Christmas light displays (if only the city could do the same for its pitiful Christmas markets.)

Meanwhile, we planned to have a quiet 7 Fishes Christmas Eve Dinner later. Our meal included Italian anchovies, Polish herring with sour cream and dill (sledzie), black Capelin caviar, a seafood bisque with cod and surimi, an herbed salmon fillet and shrimp scampi with pasta. The meal definitely was an eclectic mix as shellfish is more difficult to find here, but we made it work. I would have preferred to have a standing rib roast instead of the fish, but hubby insisted on carrying on his family’s tradition. Interestingly, the Poles usually celebrate Christmas Eve with 12 fish dishes.

Our first expat Christmas Eve dinner in Warsaw.

Here in Poland, Christmas Day is spent at home with family; and traditionally, only previously cooked food should be heated and eaten. Though I do know at least one Polish friend who’s mother is cooking a turkey today. I’ll be making a pork roast with sauerkraut, Brussels sprouts with bacon and roasted parsnips for dinner. Yum!

Wherever you are, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones too! As always, thanks for reading!

Merry Christmas!

Visiting Copenhagen’s Christmas Markets – A Bit Disappointing

12/23/2013 02:20:00 AM by Joy5 comments

With Copenhagen’s narrow, colorful houses and fairytale-like palaces, I couldn’t have imagined a more picturesque place to visit for Christmas.

Copenhagen is often considered to have one of the top 10 Christmas markets in Europe, which run from mid-November until the end of December each year. With that in mind, we decided to meet up with a fellow expat friend from Germany and spend a weekend exploring Denmark’s capital earlier this month.

A beautiful Christmas display outside a hotel in Copenhagen.

However, when we arrived at the world-famous Tivoli Gardens, we were shocked by the 95 DKK (nearly $20 USD) admission fee just to enter its Christmas Market. We quickly were realizing how expensive this Danish city was and decided to skip the Tivoli Christmas markets, which attracts more than 1 million visitors a year. Looks like the city is making a killer profit from Tivoli, but not from us.

We still had three more Christmas markets on our list.

Instead, we wandered over to the Christmas Market on Højbro Plads in the center of Copenhagen by the Stork Fountain, a gift given to the Danish Royal Family in 1894. This market was small, but included a Christmas train and plenty of stalls selling mugs of steaming gløgg (mulled wine with spices, raisins and almonds), mulled hot cider and grilled bratwursts. We warmed ourselves up with the hot gløgg as the weather was cold, damp and gray.

The Christmas Market on Højbro Plads had the best festive atmosphere in Copenhagen.

Steaming mugs of Danish gløgg.

Hubby and I drinking gløgg to stay warm in Copenhagen.

Of course, you must have a grilled brat while you're at a Christmas market!

Some tempting sweets at the Christmas markets in Copenhagen.

I hoped to find some cute, handmade, traditional Christmas ornaments, but unfortunately, only two stalls were selling these items. Honestly, I couldn’t tell whether they were really homemade or made in China, so I passed.

At a coffeeshop, we asked the barista which Christmas market was her favorite. She pointed us in the direction of the 18^th annual Christiania Christmas Market, located in Christianshavn, which is known as the city’s bohemian district. The Freetown of Christiania definitely has a more Rastafari atmosphere – if you know what I mean. I’m a fairly liberal person, but I was shocked to see so much cannabis being sold out in the public. This was a completely separate section from the Christmas market, but only 200 meters or so away too.

Christmas in Christiania.

Perhaps I would have found some unique handicraft items in Christiania, but we didn’t want to wait outside in the cold in a long line that didn’t appear to be moving. Instead, we popped into a local bar for more warming glasses of Danish gløgg.

Finally, we strolled over to the historic Nyhavn Christmas Market located along the banks of the famous Nyhavn Canal. This setting, with moored boats and colorful, 17^th-and 18^th-century townhouses as well as two former residences of well-known Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, seemed ideal for a Christmas market.

Unfortunately, Nyhavn’s market, the smallest of the four we’d seen, didn’t have much to offer besides woolen hats and scarves and more gløgg, which we happily ordered again. And the weather had turned from just being cold and gray to a miserable drizzle.

Every glass of gløgg we had was always slightly different.

An interesting concept - waffle on a stick!

Though we had a great time hanging out with our friend, Copenhagen itself did not meet my expectations and neither did the Christmas markets. The highlight was having two amazing, multi-course (also expensive) dinners over the weekend, which I’ll save for another post.

Perhaps next Christmas, we’ll just meet up with our friend in Germany instead!

Which Christmas market in Europe is your favorite?

Meeting the Authors of 2 Polish Cookbooks You Must Own

12/20/2013 10:00:00 AM by Joy3 comments

Simon stopped the car in the middle of a rural road in Lower Silesia, Poland. His wife, Beata, ran out to nearby garden and returned with a handful of wild pink roses.

“That’s what my childhood smells like to me,” she told her husband as she held open her hands full of crushed rose petals. Those rose petals would be made into a classic Polish preserve of rose petal jam.

Earlier this week, I had a special opportunity to meet Beata Zatorska, a former Polish native, and her British husband, Simon Target, the authors of Rose Petal Jam: Recipes and Stories of a Summer in Poland and Sugared Orange: Recipes and Stories of a Winter in Poland. A third cookbook focusing on Spring in Poland is in the works too. The couple was visiting Warsaw and held a book signing in connection with my local expat women’s group, International Women’s Group of Warsaw, at the Wilanow Wedel Café. I, of course, signed up immediately since I love cookbooks and am trying to learn as much as I can about Polish cooking while we live here.

Polish cookbook author, Beata Zatorska, signing copies of her latest book in Warsaw on December 16.

Zatorska wrote the two seasonal cookbooks based on her childhood memories of her grandmother and other family members in Poland as well as their own recipes. When she was 19 years old, she emigrated to Australia where she later became a family doctor and met her husband, Target. He has written and directed award-winning television documentaries and directed numerous television food shows with Australian chefs. More than 20 years later, Zatorska returned to Poland with her husband for the first time so she could finish her cookbooks and her husband could take the impressive photographs.

The front cover of the latest cookbook - Sugared Orange: Recipes & Stories from a Winter in Poland.

Rose Petal Jam: Recipes & Stories from a Summer in Poland also has been translated in German.

As I look through the cookbooks, I can’t help but be transported to Zatorska’s Poland – a childhood surrounded by loving family members and an abundance of homecooked foods based on the Polish countryside. The cookbooks, part memoir and travelogue, bring to life the food, her memories, the traditions and the seasons.

Summer produce in Poland, as shown by Target during his slideshow presentation.

The best part was being able to Zatorska and Target in person! I immediately saw how much Zatorska still loved her homeland and how her husband had fallen in love with it as well while they traveled around the countryside and returned to cities like Warsaw and Krakow. The cookbooks are lovingly put together with some beautiful photos.

Beata Zatorska, a former Polish native, and her British husband, Simon Target. Authors of two cookbooks featuring Polish cuisine.

I’ve already starting bookmarking the recipes that I would like to make such as makowiec (a traditional, sweet poppy seed roll), apple pancakes, Lidia’s roast chicken and wild mushroom dumplings. I bet you won’t be able to resist these recipes either!

If you have any interest in Polish cooking and the stories behind the food, then you’ll love these cookbooks as much as I am!

Smacznego!

I waited my turn so I could get both of my cookbooks signed by Zatorska.

Exploring Winter Wonderland in London

12/17/2013 07:30:00 AM by Joy15 comments

I can’t believe that just last week we were in London! Time certainly has flown by!

Since this was only my second trip to London and it’s Christmas time, I wanted to make sure I saw some of the Christmas markets. Sadly, I only had time for one market as our flight from Warsaw first was delayed by 2 hours, then canceled and finally rescheduled for 5 hours later in the day. We finally arrived in London around 6 p.m. with just enough time to enjoy a fantastic dinner at NOPI Restaurant (from the creators behind the Jerusalem and Plenty cookbooks.)

One day while my husband was working, I strolled over to Hyde Park to explore the Christmas Market as part of the Winter Wonderland. I was envisioning rustic Christmas stalls filled with handmade goodies not a park full of glitzy carnival rides for children.

Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park in London.

I finally found the Angel’s Market which is home to about 100 wooden stalls selling everything from Christmas decorations to homemade candies to leather wallets and Turkish lamps. (I seem to find a Turkish store wherever I go!) The market is open daily, except Christmas Day, through January 5.

The Winter Wonderland entrance near the Hyde Park Corner tube station.

And you can't leave a Christmas market without buying a Turkish lamp!

Lots of food and drink options at least!

Of course, you'll find several stalls selling mulled wine and hot chocolate too!

You can avoid the carnival ride section by taking the London tube to the Hyde Park Corner exit and following the signs to Winter Wonderland. I discovered that little tidbit after I walked through everything. Oh well!

The market is a little over the top, and I didn’t find as many authentic-looking, handmade Christmas decorations as I had hoped. I did buy two wooden decorations made from Black Forest wood in Germany. Guess next year, we need to visit one of the real Christmas markets in Germany!

I concluded my market visit in London by eating a grilled German bratwurst and drinking a pint of Weiss beer. A Christmas market doesn’t get any more authentic that, right?