Polish Food, Panic Attacks, and Pizza

One of the reasons that I've gotten into cooking recently is that my roommate Jenn loves to cook. It's been fun to share recipes and to get her input on dishes that I've made. At her suggestion, we started a weekly "family dinner" night. We rotate cooking duties and use these evenings as an opportunity to try completely new recipes. So far, we've eaten moussaka, stuffed chicken breasts, and zesty peach and avocado shrimp burgers.

This week, we welcomed a special guest cook to our house for family dinner night. Our friend Chuck offered to share his heritage with us and cook Polish food. I hardly knew anything about Polish cuisine and Chuck described it as ultimate comfort food. That's something I can get behind! 

He made golabki, which basically consists of ground meat and rice wrapped in cabbage and covered in a tomato sauce and a dollop of sour cream, a staple of many Polish dishes. I thought it was interesting that the rice wasn't cooked before it went into the oven. Instead, it cooked in the meat juices while it was in the oven. I would definitely try to make this myself sometime!

Jenn and I had been talking about making pizza for the past few days and we finally decided to do it last night. Unfortunately, we hardly had any of the necessary ingredients and we waited until very late in the day to go shopping. This leads me to the second part of this post's title, panic attacks. I'd just like to say that the writer in me loves alliteration and I totally exaggerated when I used this term. 

Basically, I learned that it's important to have a good idea of exactly what I need before I go to the store and to make sure I'm not hungry or likely to get hungry. I did neither yesterday which led me to get frustrated when my phone didn't work for looking up recipes. I wandered the aisles aimlessly and then got very grumpy when I needed to eat something. 

I also realized I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to cook something new, to make everything from scratch, and to have it be perfect. It's good to remind myself that I'm still relatively new to regular cooking and that the whole point is to have fun and to experiment. I finally bought the pizza ingredients and a snack to tide me over until dinner.

Jenn decided to make a margherita pizza with some of the yummy tomatoes she'd bought at the farmer's market the previous weekend while I chose to make a white pizza with chicken and onions on top. We started with the dough. We used a pretty standard recipe with the basic ingredients of flour, sugar, yeast, and water. Jenn's electric mixer really came in handy!

After we made the dough, we let it rise for an hour. You can see the before and after pictures above. With the dough done, it was time to move on to the sauce and topping. I started my white sauce by melting butter and mixing in some flour. I added milk and then parmesan cheese, garlic, and fresh basil. Jenn and I were rubbing elbows as she worked on her red sauce. Here's a pretty picture of the two different sauces side by side. You can also see some covered dough left on the stove while we were cooking sauces. We realized it might not have been the best idea to leave it there when the dough ended up partially cooked from the head of the stove. Live and learn.

With the sauces done, I moved on to sauteing my chicken with onions, garlic, oregano, and a bit of paprika while Jenn grated the mozzarella and cut up the tomatoes for her pizza. Finally, we were ready to roll out the dough, add toppings, and cook our pizzas in the oven. Below, you can see the final results. We were so pleased! We enjoyed the pizzas with a few glasses of wine and good conversation with another friend who had visited us.