Keep Calm and Eat Paczki

It’s Fat Tuesday, y’all. If you can’t be celebrating Mardi Gras with those crazy Creoles down south eating mud bugs and collecting beads, then make your way to Chicago. We have a little tradition here called Pączki Day, an annual culinary indulgence that makes Fat Tuesday live up to its name.

For one day a year, we stuff our faces with fist-sized fried yeasty donuts bursting with rich fillings like custard, cherry and strawberry and either glazed, iced or dusted with copious amounts of powdered sugar. We pronounce them “Pooch-key” or “Punch-key” or even “Poonch-key.” All of which will get you one of the richest donuts you have ever had.

Fried with lard and love, these Polish donuts were traditionally made to use up all those rich ingredients before the fasting period started with Lent. There are so many Polish immigrants in Chicago that pączki began a tradition here as well.

I love being of Polish decent living in Chicago. Although this city is a melting pot, Eastern Europeans are a stronghold here. Granted I am pretty far removed from the homeland, and my relatives made a stopover in the Ukraine before emigrating here, but in Chicago, I am a “ski,” and I am proud of that. For as much as I complain about finding good Southern food in Chicago, try finding gołąbki (cabbage rolls) or good pierogi in South Carolina!

Eatin’ High on the Hog: My Family’s New Year’s Food Traditions

Mixing the specken dicken batter on New Year’s Eve

I’m going to let the cat out of the bag…technically I’m Yankee-born, BUT I am Southern by the grace of God. Although, I spent 25 of my 31 years in South Carolina, I was born in New Jersey, and my parents—and much of my extended family–hail from Pennsylvania. So why am I sharing this with you? Well, this post is a little different. Instead of sharing a bit of the South or the Midwest, I wanted to share some of my family’s food traditions.

Every New Year’s my mom, step-dad and I join my extended family in Sinking Spring, PA. We come from Chicago (obviously!), South Carolina (double obvious!!), Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and although we are one family, we bring with us different regional and familial traditions.

This year there were 18 of us mostly under one roof, ranging from 10 months to 83 years old. We watched college bowl games, celebrated the ball drop and exchanged Christmas gifts. There was even a fun side trip to the family-run Blair Vineyards for a wine tasting. However, when we are together, we spend much of our visit in the kitchen partaking in a tradition we call “grazing.”

Now, check out some of my family’s favorite New Year’s food traditions.

It’s Supper Time: Shrimp and Grits Recipe

My new Lodge skillet…perfectly seasoned for shrimp and grits

Shrimp and grits will make yer tongue slap yer brains out! The Lowcountry staple is one of my favorite Southern meals to cook, and when I got a new cast iron dutch oven for Christmas, I decided that shrimp and grits would make the perfect Christmas dinner.

The recipe originated in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia and was originally a “fisherman’s breakfast.” It’s the epitome of Southern comfort food, and I dare you to not fall in love with the sweet shrimp, creamy grits, smoky meat and rich gravy that make this dish perfect for any meal or occasion.

There are a lot of variations on the recipe, but this is my tried and true favorite, and I have spent a lot of time in the kitchen trying to perfect it. There are some ingredients (bell peppers and tomatoes, for instance) that will show up in variations of shrimp and grits, but you should avoid them…they have no place in this simplistically delicious concoction.

There are four big steps to making shrimp and grits—the shrimp, the grits, the sauce and putting it all together. This recipe will serve 3-4 people (2 if you are really hungry!).

Goin’ Hog Wild for Boiled Peanuts (Recipe)

Y’all seem to love reading about food, so here’s a little post about one of the simplest and tastiest dishes from the South–boiled peanuts (pronounced “boyld peanuts”). If I had to guess, you just turned up your nose at the idea of boiled peanuts since you are used to the roasted variety, but trust me, these things are so tasty, you’ll wanna slap ya mama.

A boiled peanut roadside stand in South Carolina. Photo taken Dec. 21, 2014 (thanks for sharing, Dad).

Boiled peanuts, by the way, are boiled in salt water until they are soft, and the best way to eat them is hot right out of the pot. Where I come from, you get your boiled peanuts from a roadside stand. You’ll see a handwritten sign on the roadside with big letters “Boiled Peanuts” in front of a lean-to or the like. There will be a friend there (in the South, there are no strangers) selling boiled peanuts that were likely harvested in the past 24 hours. They will dish them up from a massive pot and hand you a brown paper sack, styrofoam cup or plastic bag with steaming hot goodness.

There is something so satisfying about popping that shell and sucking out the bit of salt water before digging out the tender peanuts. Do I have you salivating yet?

For the Love of Waffle House

My favorite meal…patty melt, hashbrowns (smothered, covered, country on the side), extra pickles, and coffee

I have a confession. This weekend I drove three and a half hours to Indianapolis to have Waffle House, and I dragged a fellow Waffle House nut along with me. It’s the closest Waffle House to Chicago, and this is not the first time we have made that trek. Laugh if you want, but after the obvious family and friends, Waffle House is one of the things I miss the most about living in the South.

Waffle House is more than just a consistently perfect breakfast (or lunch or dinner)—for me, it was a rite of passage. When I started driving, I was finally allowed to go to Waffle House, within my curfew, of course. For my friends and me, it was a place we made our own. We met there for breakfast before school and on Friday nights after the football games. The jukebox was always set to our favorite songs—“Hotel California,” a few songs from Fleetwood Mac and Don McLean’s ode to the day the music died.

In college, Waffle House became something else. During my first semester, we would gather late at night when we needed a break from studying. We joked about being the sisters of Pie-Pie-Pie, sung to the tune of N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” playing on the jukebox.

And when my friend Ashlee was killed in a car accident over Christmas break, Waffle House became the place her friends would gather when we couldn’t sleep late at night. Believe it or not, hashbrowns, jukeboxes and the late night crowd offered a unique kind of solace to 19-year-old girls devastated by the loss of a truly kindred spirit.

Fixin’ to Explain Soul Food

“I just had fried chicken, so I had soul food, right?” The answer is maybe.

Ox tails with mac & cheese and cornbread from Priscilla’s Ultimate Soulfood in Hillside, IL.

I often find myself explaining to people the difference between Southern food and soul food…yes, there is a difference, or rather, the terms are not interchangeable. There is an overlap in recipes—fried chicken, for example, falls in both categories—and some people may argue they are the same thing, but bless their hearts…they are just wrong.

Today’s iconic Southern recipes—whether soul, low country, creole or any other sub-genre of Southern cuisine—grew from necessity …why else would anyone eat chitlins?! I’m not a trained culinary anthropologist, so I won’t trace the history of Southern food, but summed up in a nutshell, the South was rural—you ate what you grew or raised or what was grown or raised for you.

Soul food, specifically, traces its roots back to West Africa and came to the south by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It isn’t a pretty story, and there is no way to make it more palatable. Wealthy white plantation owners wanted to feed their slaves as cheaply as possible, so slaves often received scraps—fatback maybe or pig intestines.

Of course, you know what they say about karma…after the Civil War, everyone in the South was poor, including those former plantation owners. The lines blur a bit between the different types of Southern food because everyone was just eating what they had, which wasn’t much. Now back to the soul food.