Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Monday, October 12, 2009

Just a week after arriving, I hosted my first dinner party last night in our new “home away from home” — a lovely, vintage-1960s townhouse in the Bielany section of Warsaw. Nothing fancy, but a way to extend my gratitude to the Malinowski family for keeping Henry for the five weeks between the time his school started on September 1 and I was able to get away from North Carolina.

Working in someone else’s kitchen is always a challenge — especially when the hostess is not around for questions. You don’t know where things are, and invariably some item you think is essential is nowhere to be found. But like so many aspects of leaving the comforts of your home, this kind of challenge provides an exercise in resourcefulness. Pani Malgosia’s kitchen equipment suggests that most of what I prepare here will have to be done stovetop. Her oven has morphed into a storage unit, holding a variety of frying pans. And there is no microwave, an appliance to which I admit growing accustomed — especially for reheating beverages, leftovers and the like.

In this kitchen, if you want hot chocolate, for example, you prepare it in a pot over a flame. When Henry had the urge for hot chocolate the other night, finding no cocoa powder, we took a heaping spoonful of Nutella and melted it down as the base, stirring in real milk. (Surprisingly delicious!) When you want to heat your leftovers, you have to figure out a way to do it over a flame — without burning them. The one item I’ve seen in every Polish kitchen that I would like to have in mine: an electric water kettle, which quickly boils water to satisfy the never-ending Polish desire for herbata – hot tea.

For our dinner party, I made mashed potatoes, which I peeled, boiled and mashed with an old-fashioned hand utensil. For the main course, I prepared a stir-fry of onions, broccoli, and chicken chunks in a tomato sauce. We bought all the ingredients at a neighborhood grocery store, and Henry and I carried our purchases home on foot.

The Malinowskis appeared on the stroke of five with a lovely autumnal potted plant as a house-warming present. They weren’t especially hungry but politely accepted modest portions of my meal. After dinner, while the three boys played hide-and-seek in the upstairs bedrooms (which include such delights as a slide-in bed in my room on which a slim boy, or two, can hide himself), Jarek Malinowski shared the new statistics showing that Poland has climbed to No. 41 in the United Nations’ HDI (Human Development Index) quality-of-life rankings, just three spots shy of the first tier of countries. This UN barometer looks beyond a nation’s gross domestic product to gauge a country’s broader definition of well-being, taking into account such factors as health and longevity; education and literacy; and standard of living.

“It’s remarkable that Poland is already at No. 41,” he said, given that his country has had a mere twenty years to get its economy and infrastructure up and running. (By comparison, the HDI put Norway at No. 1; Canada, No. 4; and the U.S. at No. 13.) It’s clear that Jarek is proud to be a part of the country’s ascendancy and renaissance. In the first half of 2009, he noted, Poland was the only country in Europe to show net positive growth, around half a percent growth — a remarkable accomplishment in this global economy.

As Jarek and his wife Oliwia were opening the two presents I’d carted from the States, the back end of the dinner table started to give way, right at the spot where his young son Wiktor was eating a cookie. This slide caused a tea cup to fly to the floor and shatter. Jarek was nimble. He dashed over to the collapsing end of the table and, with the help of Henry, me and Oliwia, managed to prop up the aging, wobbly table. Instead of fretting over the potential trauma to Wiktor, Oliwia immediately dispatched her six-year-old to move the remaining vulnerable breakables to the nearby buffet.

The moment reminded me how quick and resilient the Poles are, and how many opportunities Henry and I will have to learn lessons of resourcefulness from them.