My lasagna
I think that our culinary preferences are mainly shaped by our parents and grandparents. At least I have no doubt that my love of cooking was instilled in me by my Dad, and I learned my love of food from my Mom.
My father, who has been dead for over thirty years, was born in a two-room, country house near Węgrów. My grandmother, a brave woman, raised my father and his six brothers without the help of my grandfather, who sought meaning in his short life in alcohol. She cultivated a small field, raised a horse, a cow and two pigs. She fed the boys mainly with what she produced on the farm or gathered in the forest by the house. I will never forget the taste of alder sausages from a pan with reheated potatoes and sour milk, butter straight from the churn right after churning with hot bread from the oven and black pudding fried with onion.
My dad's favorite dish was a pan of onions fried in lard with a slice of bread and kartoflanka, which was a potato soup with carrots, onions and cracklings.
My father left home without any cooking skills, but he happily married my mother, who was well-prepared to be a cook, like most women in those days, and because he and my mother worked "in shifts", he learned to cook, willingly or unwillingly, every other day.
I don't remember the taste of his culinary achievements, but I remember well how he sat me on the refrigerator and proudly showed me how to make soup.
I remember the cooking of my mother, who died ten years ago, as excellent. It was delicious and the best in the world, as any child would probably say about their mother's cooking.
My mother had a conservative approach to cooking. She didn't like changes and novelties. She had a fixed, twenty, thirty-course set of dishes that she brought from her family home in Włocławek in Kuyavia, and she never went beyond that set. She didn't like pubs, thinking that it was throwing money down the drain on whims and experiments that had nothing to do with healthy and tasty food. Her classics are inimitable and unique. No one will ever be able to recreate the taste of her tomato soup with rice cooked under a duvet, beef steaks cooked with bread crust and pickled cucumber, well-done minced meat with carrots and peas, chicken entrecote poured with water while frying with fried beetroot, lazy with sugar and butter, kidneys with buckwheat and pickled cucumber, and mashed milk soup with pumpkin.
My passion for cooking woke up late. For a long time I was too busy with work and it was only after I turned forty that I started to spread my wings in the kitchen. In general, I think that cooking is like raising children - in a way that is imperceptible to the parents, they absorb their preferences, attitudes and worldview like a sponge, and sooner or later they start to draw from this treasury. In my house, there is a constant struggle for access to the oven, mixer and cooking burners. Mateusz, 24, and Julia, 21, started cooking around eighteen, and I can already see Maja, 14, taking her first steps in the kitchen.
In my kitchen, I focus on spontaneity and improvisation. I do not understand the chemist's adherence to recipes and precise measurement of ingredients according to someone else's recipe. I prefer to be inspired by a list of ingredients or an interesting culinary technique, and I want to come up with the final method of preparation, spices and processing time myself, even if it were to fail.
Okay. Enough theory. Let's get down to specifics. My duck lasagna. A lot of work, but the end result is indisputably delicious.
Take a fresh, whole duck. Cut out the breasts with wings and legs. Fry thoroughly in oil over high heat and set aside. On the remaining heat, fry a large piece of smoked bacon cut into small cubes, then add a handful of the Italian vegetable trio, i.e. onion, carrot and celery cut into cubes. When they are well fried, add a large amount of tomato passata or canned tomatoes, and spices of your choice - in addition to the obligatory salt, pepper and paprika, I add some Indian flavors: garam masala, tikka massala and cumin. Cook for half an hour. Then add the fried duck meat and place covered in the oven for 2-3 hours. After baking, cool, remove the bones from the meat and shred with two forks. Throw a lot of garlic into a pan with olive oil and before it changes color, add a few handfuls of spinach. Add salt or soy sauce and remove from heat as soon as all the leaves have wilted. Put butter and flour in a pan, mix and heat until it changes color. Pour in milk with nutmeg, pepper and salt. Mix until it reaches a smooth consistency of thick cream. Take twelve egg yolks and the right amount of flour. Add salt. Knead. Add water if the dough is too dry. Leave for an hour, then roll out and cut out millimeter-thick rectangular sheets. The easiest way is to use an Italian rolling machine, but you can also use a regular rolling pin. Place in boiling water for a minute or two, and after removing, grease with oil so that the sheets do not stick together. Arrange successive layers of pasta and duck sauce in a roasting pan, alternating with spinach. Lightly cover each layer with béchamel sauce. Cover the last layer of pasta with béchamel and grated parmesan. Bake for 45 minutes at 180 degrees, then 15 minutes at 200 degrees, to brown the top well. Once it has rested a bit, enjoy. Also good cold.
