On sunday, together with our canadian photographer friends, it was our turn to cook for the Polish crowd here at the station. They wanted a true american meal, so we gave them the best we could (considering we were in a Polish kitchen): spicy ribs, mac & cheese, beans, chocolate chip cookies and iced tea made with glacier ice. It was definitely an exercise in improvisation and trial and error. Of course, every package was unreadable, which led to mishaps like dumping half a cup of salt, rather than sugar, into the rib sauce. Then there were the items they simply did not have here, like brown sugar, crucial for cookies and ribs. Finally, the oven was tricky: it burned my first pan of cookies on the bottom, and my second on the top, which led Nell to make her own batch, and these turned out wonderfully. Hers had baking powder (which we had finally found, with some help on the translation), so they flattened out and became like your average cookies, whereas mine stayed in tight little balls. We passed these off as “cookies from California” and “cookies from Alaska,” and nobody was the wiser.
In the end, after all our worrying, they seemed to enjoy the meal. We had a few people asking where the soup was, which has been the main dish at every lunch here at the station. One also proclaimed that tea is better hot than “z lodovyetz” (with glacier). But they dealt with those breaks from tradition in stride. Our winningest praise came from our friend Vitek, who said, “You have won the food contest! First prize is another day in the kitchen next Sunday!”
The polish scientists and mechanics sit down to the American meal.