WHAT DID YOU EAT FOR POLISH EASTER TODAY?

Peole ahve already shared their Easter family favourite son this forum, but what did you actually have today? In my family it was:
-- sharing blessed eggs as a mutual wish of Happy Easter
-- white barszcz with hard-boiled eggs, sausage, ham, horseradish and cubed curd cheese
-- light rye and dark rye bread
-- cold cuts: roast pork loin, pastrami (non-traditonal), cooked whtie and smoekd sausage
-- beetroot & horseradish (ćwikła)
-- hot baked white sausage (biała kiełbasa pieczona)
-- boield potatoes
-- tossed salad vinaigrette (non-traditional
-- chocolate maurka (cake)
-- raisin-studded babka

Barbeque on the beach.

White Borscht, hard boiled eggs , fresh horse radish, Jewish rye bread.

Pierogi, Baked kielbasa, szynka, kapusta with fresh sausage , mashed potatoes, lima beans in sauce

Babka, makowiec

New York State ROSE wine (BURP)

My friend invited me to a wonderful Easter breakfast, which lasted about three hours! :) We started with a plate of white barszcz with eggs and sausage. The plate had to include some pieces which were blessed. Then we chowed on variety of home made salads, sausage, bacon, cheeses, stuffed eggs...After that, we had home made Easter babka and cookies. The kids painted the eggs. Each and everyone was a work of art!

I did not take a picture of absolutely everything, but here are some samples!

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  A peek at the table
  
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  Another look
  
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  The most beautiful Easter Eggs ever!
  
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  Easter lamb made of sugar
  

That looks so good Eurola :) I love the decorated eggs, I miss doing them and am going to do some next year for sure. Yummy food for sure.

Great pictures :)

Sour rye soup with eggs (a Silesian favourite, żurek z jajkiem) was the starter. Then some white sausages (biały kiełbasy) with some nice sarepska mustard. I'd've preferred some Roleski spicy mustard (they do a super copy of Colmans for 2PLN per jar) but I was thoroughly grateful that mustard was on offer. A wee dabble of horseradish too. Some culinary meats and cheeses were served up too. After that came a couple of slices of cake filled with some dashes of vodka and then the bigos on fresh bread.

I really appreciate the lengths that they went to to make it a memorable occasion. They are hospitable people whom I have the utmost respect and admiration for. REAL people. The only thing is focussing in Polish for that long but it's all practice :)

Here are more pictures...close up. I wish the we clearer to really see the details...

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Awwww thanks so much Eurola..........I forgot how great the eggs can look :)

They are just lovely :)

Happy Easter Eurola !

Happy Easter to you too Lir and to all PF'ers!

Max the dog and I are going to the forest preserve now to walk off some of the calories! :)

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  lady bug egg
  
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  Easter bunny managed to drop some egg on the lawn...
  

Happy Easter everyone!

I had kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, mashed potatoes, and corn. :) Mmm.

That is so cute, I love it :)


Yeah but were they chocolate ones lol :)


Thank you Eurola and 'Happy Easter' to everybody else too :)

third time im spending Easter in usa far away from home, family and friends and again i had to work on this special day..didnt have time to prepare anything special.. just had hot dog and potato salad from grocery store today..little sad but true..happy easter everyone

A packet of crisps and a cheese sandwich.

Thank You for showing the pictures. What a beautiful tradition. I wish we had this kind of tradition in my country...I love the eggs!

boiled eggs + yesterday's pizza :)

I had all seafood: crab legs, shrimp and oysters. Delicious!

Happy Easter.

Zur for breakfast.

Dinner was the usual many items: ham, pork, sausage, potatoes, saurkraut, potato salad, red beet salad, bread, etc., with beer and wine.

Then the fruit & pastries to finish us.

I forgot to say HAPPY EGG & BUNNY DAY to everyone... or anyone at all until now.

Jan 16, 10, 22:52 - Thread attached on merging:
Polish Easter fare?

When you thunk of the Polish Easter comfort foods of your childhood, what comes
to mind? What were the absolute 'musts' on your family's Easter table? Do you still enjoy any of them at present?

For me this hasn't changed since childhood.

Since it is the end of fasting, we can eat well on Easter Sunday. In the morning, off to church with a basket nicely prepared with eggs, bread, salt and sausages to get it blessed. We share the eggs with whoever is present at breakfast and share wishes in a similar way as at Christmas with opłatek( blessed waver). At breakfast there are mainly eggs, various sausages and cold meats with lots of chrzan and ćwikła( horseradish and beetroot/horseradish).

For dinner we have roasted duck or turkey and żurek(white sour soup). There are baked cakes for sweats.

People in large families probably have more things, but I think the above is typical.

The only must are eggs.

But it's January and -10 C. Shouldn't we be making bigos now?

I'm still a child and it all sounds good

Our family's Easter breakfast has not changed very much since my childhood, only it has become much more easy to buy everything. As it was mentioned before, eggs are a must. We used to boil some of them in water with onion peels, to give them golden yellow colour.

Biala kielbasa (Polish white, raw sausage, made from pork, not smoked, seasoned with marjoram), various types of ham, baked or raw and heavily smoked, etc. A must-have addition for kielbasa was horseradish, made from the scratch - not from the shop. It grew in our garden, and had to be baked and smashed. Bland and awful. The only Easter thing that is gone from our menu now, well, because I am the lady of the house ;) Remember a moment of confusion back in the 80's, when we by accident, baked the precious kielbasa polska (heavily smoked, fatty, spicy sausage, difficult to buy in crisis times) together with the biala kielbasa. It was suposed to be eaten with reverence, slice by slice, during a week, and we just baked it and had to be eaten on breakfast. Well, it was a good breakfast! For dinner, we always eat pork roast. Hopefully no vegetarians are reading this, anyway.

Proceeding now tactfully to desserts, the babka is a must. Well, babka is a sweet spongy
(see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babka_%28cake%29)
though we never made yeast cake, always bisquit-cake with cocoa inside. We called this
babka z dżouem, well, if you are wondering what is this dżou, I am afraid that it probably came from the English name Joe, and in the tricky politically incorrect way denoted reference to an Afro-American. Dunno why. 'Joe babka' is, anyway, delicious, and my favourite. I think that in the shops now they selling it as 'marble cake' (marmurkowe'). We also eat cheese cake - made from semi-shortcrust pastry (I mean that the cake has less fat than typical shortcrust... maybe someone has a better English word for ciasto półkruche...) White cheese is there stuffed with raisins and nuts. I must end now, for I am gettting hungry, and there is nearly 23.00 here in Poland.. ;)

Sunday morning, the beautifully laid table is covered with colored eggs, cold meats, coils of sausages, ham, yeast cakes, pound cakes, poppy-seed cakes, and in the middle of it all, a lamb made of sugar, commemorating the resurrected Christ. No smoke was permitted; therefore no warm meals were served. Horseradish was mixed with beets, “cwikla”, traditionally present on polish Easter tables. Sharing a boiled egg with one’s relatives is a national tradition. A piece of egg with salt and pepper, consecrated by priest, is an inseparable accessory in the good wishes we extend to each other at Easter. Each member of the household received also a piece of the consecrated bread. When spread with horseradish, it was supposed to give protection against throat diseases and against illnesses and complaints.

Cakes were very important ingredients of Easter breakfast:" mazurki” were prepared only for those occasion. “Mazurek” is a flat cake, usually on a pastry or a wafer, covered with paste of nuts, almonds, cheese etc., colorfully iced and decorated with jam and nuts and raisins. On top of this, imaginative decorations were placed, such as eggs of icing; willow branches made of marzipan, chocolate flowers, and other delicacies. Artistic letters made of cream read “Hallelujah” – joy of the Resurrection. The list of possibilities making “mazurek” cake are endless, ranging from almond flavored, marzipan, chocolate, raisins, nuts and figs, poppy-seed, orange, crumbly with wine or vodka, apple, French-style, layered, and many others.And "YES" we still keep up with the tradition from the blessing of the Easter basket to easter mass.

Anybody eat biały barszcz biłgorajski at their święcone? It contains ham, sausage, hard-cooked eggs, curd cheese, horseradish, sour cream and stale ryebread cubes and is flavoured with garlic and marjoram. This is a must in my family.

There are regional variations of this soup. Żurek, barszcz biały are similar and are traditional Easter dishes.

BTW, eggs are a sybmol of life and rebirth in Christian culture, so it was in the cultures predating Chistianity. The popular tradition to paint them at Easter is still popular.

Pisanki(below Ukrainian ones) like


is still a practiced tradition.

Do you take a symbolic amount of food in your basket or everything? The first (and last) time I took my basket to church with my mother-in-law (packed with just a small amount of food), we stood in church next to a lady who had everything, whole links of sausages, a whole loaf of bread, a whole root of horseradish, etc. Does anybody do that anymore? BTW, my basket was horribly underdressed ;)

kielbasastories.blogspot.com

It is symbolic, a little of each. Just like the drops of Holy water don't have to exactly hit your basket. Of course, I also see people with 30 pounds of food in their supersize basket. Ask yourself why are you doing this? If you are doing it so everyone sees you, and then will attest that you are pious, then get a huge basket, pray loudly, and buy the clothes you can't afford.

I have a basket like the one at the top of the thread. It is simple with a white cloth so I can cover the food because I walk to church and there are cars, buses, and dust.

It's always nice to keep up with the Polish traditions like the blessing of the Easter Basket.

When I was a child in America, we did the Easter egg hunt thing after church. I heard that here people do an Easter nest. I've only heard that from a couple of people. Is it regional or maybe old-fashioned or maybe "new"-fashioned? Has anyone heard of that?

kielbasastories.blogspot.com

Yup----So the story goes like this-----------
When the Germans Settlers, known as Mennonites, or Amish, had settled in Dutch Country, Pennsylvania, in the 1700's, they had introduced their Easter traditions into the American Culture. Oschter Haws, was one of the greatest and most fun traditions for children. The children waited all year long for the Oschter Haws to come, and lay coloured eggs in their nest, so they were especially good behaved children, for fear he might not come.

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