Polska Kuchnia (Polish cuisine)

My name is John Connolly and I moved to Poland with a plan to absorb as much culture as possible. You can read about this more at my blog, An Englishman in Poland(Click below)

http://www.talesofenglishman.blogspot.com/

I learnt much of if not all of the recipes in these pages from my adopted babcja (polish for grandmother pronounced bup-cha) Ania who could not speak any English. I learnt through observation and communicated through my broken Polish and hand signals. The most widely used by far was two thumbs up. I have tried to reflect this in my site by not relying too heavily on exact amounts of this and amounts of that because I believe it is more fun to roughly follow a recipe and experiment. I hate the method of cooking where it is supposedly necessary to measure exactly 250ml of milk. I understand if it is for bread, pancake or cake recipes where you need to be more exact and I do use exact amounts for cakes here but mostly exact amounts are not essential here and I urge you to follow your instinct and experiment - it is so much more fun and there is many times that I have found ways to improve dishes just because I experimented. Furthermore I become bored if I eat something with exactly the same taste again and again, remember....

"variety be the spice of life!"

I am going to add anything that relates to Polish cuisine and I apologise for that I am not using Polish letters in Polish words yet, but I will rectify that soon.

Please feel free to comment on anything and I will try to reply as quickly as possible :)

Introduction to Polish food

Polish cuisine is very traditional in it's own right but also heavily influenced by foreign tastes and consequently uses a large variety of ingredients. The Slavic influence can be seen e.g. with the usage of kaszsa, but there is also signs of Jewish, Turkish, Hungarian, Italian and French influences largely due to many times in it's history when it was occupied by different nations. There are quite large differences that can be seen depending on where you are situated in Poland, and so I am going to concentrate on the Western and South-western areas since this is where I lived.
For a more comprehensive account of history visit the link below

Polish food history