Muffin Tin Monday: Your Family, Unplugged in the Kitchen
Can I help it if two of the kids’ activities I like to participate in overlapped this week?
Muffin Tin Monday was a themed lunch: exploring your family, your heritage, your ancestry through food.
The Unplug Your Kids challenge word was kitchen.
So we had to have an Unplugged Muffin Tin!
In order to prepare for today’s lunch, JediBoy and I were working even before breakfast. We decided to make homemade Polish egg noodles, or kluski. These were the best part of my Buszi’s homemade chicken noodle soup. One year when I was in college, my mother and I visited my grandmother and I watched her make pie crusts and placek and kluski - and wrote down what she was doing. Before that, I only knew how to help. Now I have my own recipe to follow.
We made the dough before breakfast - two eggs, two cups of flour, a little oil, a pinch of salt, and enough water to make it stick together, but not too much. We rolled the dough out into a nice flat disc, about two hands across. JediBoy loves to use the rolling pin, and was excited that I reached this one down from the cupboard, because this was my Buszi’s rolling pin, the one that made so many kluski for me.
The hard part was waiting! The dough has to dry out before you cut it, about half a day. Really, it’s better to make kluski for dinner than for lunch, because they have a bit longer to dry. JediBoy was thrilled to flip the dough halfway through the morning and then was begging to cut it. Finally at lunchtime we cut the dough into noodles about two inches long, rolled in our hands to be curly.
We cooked the noodles in chicken broth and a little water for about 5 minutes, and they were ready to join our muffin tins.
We had kluski, huckleberries (frozen and thawed, of course, since it’s November), pierogies (from a box - not everything can be homemade!), kielbasa, horseradish with beets (just so they could taste a tiny bit), and ham. They’re even served in a pair of my Buszi’s muffin tins!
November 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
well done! What a fantastic way to get your kids involved!
November 10th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Fun! One of my college roommates loved to make that. I like how you put it in the muffin tins with all the other food.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Great project. Sam loves studying his family history. This would be a really fun way for him to learn about it.