May Street Tapes - The Three Bears

Marty saved audiotape that originated in May Street, on his Dziadzi's, our JPZ's, reel-to-reel tape recorder. Who remembers JPZ's tape recorders, or can find an image of a similar machine? I only recall Marty's reel-to-reel from the 1960s.

Today's sound file is of a recording that must be from the 1950s. John, can you pin down a date range perhaps?

Marty performed some complicated and exacting procedure involving a tape player and some fancy borrowed sound equipment to convert audio signal to digital, and transmitted results to me in .mp3 file format. Thanks, Marty!  Here is presented the first sound file, in which JPZ reads fairy tales to his youngest, Johnny.

Clicking the link below will take you to the SoundCloud site. Email me privately for the password.

May Street Tape - Three Bears by jzdro | Free Listening on SoundCloud

Alternatively, you can listen by clicking the Play icon within the embedded file below.

It starts out with the conclusion of Little Red Riding Hood. Then JPZ proposes to read the next tale, pronouncing the title as Tree Bears. The Polish language has no th sound at all. If Polish is your first language, your baby tongue, you are going to maintain normal speed of your English speech by making a quick substitution for th with either t or d. After all, there's stuff to do, right?

A related idea is suggested when JPZ says here she comes. Polish nouns are marked for gender. You just do not issue a noun from your mouth until you have inflected it properly for gender. No gender specified for the English noun story? Nie ma problem! The Polish equivalent is historia, a feminine noun. So there you go: here she comes.

What an interesting old story. Three this, three that, three times: a 3x3 matrix.

Fascinatingly, the predator species and the prey species change places. First, the bears are vulnerable when their home is invaded. The listener is invited to feel empathy for them, even unto hearing Baby Bear plaintively ask the lassie to stay and play. But at the end Goldilocks runs, and stays away. The take-home message is that bears may be furry and cute and have families like you do, and it is good to be empathetic,  but don't mess with bears.  That is wisdom from the ancestors, all right.

At 4:40, JPZ opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock he made. You can hear him adjusting the hands to a certain hour. Thank you, Marty, for bringing to us the sound of that grandfather clock striking the hour.

From 5:57, JPZ sings the Good Night song!  I understand only about half of it. John, can you come up with a transcription and translation?  Tłumacz and also Wikisłownik  are your friends in this!

Well, family, please comment with your impressions and questions. If you are reading this in email, please go to Gene and Clar's and comment in the comment box at the bottom of the post. Thanks for reading.

Kuchnia: Zupy Szczawiowej

As promised in a previous post, G&C will be covering a wider variety of topics. Today's Cuisine features zupa made from szczaw, sorrel, Rumex acetosa.

The darn stuff is so easy to grow. Find a catalog that offers it, prepare the ground, bung the seeds in, and have patience. Growth is slow compared to that of some of the lettuces, for example, but then you see it is slow to bolt, as well.

A delightful sour taste is the outstanding characteristic of this pot-herb. I’d long used it as a minority leaf in a salad bowl, just for the lemony sour accent. This year, the crop was abundant and I had the time, so I whacked off half a row and brought it in.

                        

The chosen starting point was an online Martha Stewart recipe. At Launch, I hauled out a cauldron, melted butter in it, and added a nice little pile of minced white onion. Those pungent little bits softened up in 5 or 10 minutes while giving up their tear-inducing sulfur compounds.

While that was happening, I cut up sorrel leaves into thin strips. Addition of those strips to the onion was Stage 2. The ratio of leaves to broth was to be 1:2. I had quite a pile of leaves; adding 3 cups at a time, the result was 12 cups of raw, sliced leaf material requiring 24 cups of broth. That used up my leaves, which was a prime object.

It seemed like an outrageous volume of leaf material, but it cooked down to a smaller volume, like spinach and other greens.

At this point, leaf color changed from bright, clean green to dead-turtle-in-a-puddle tint. Can you guess why I was not distressed in the least by this?

  
                           

The reason was the fragrance. Simultaneous with the color change was the release of many volatile fragrance molecules. It was lemon perfume time, all through the kitchen.

All was ready for Stage 3, addition of the broth. This time I had some turkey broth and some beef broth, qs to 24 cups with an aqueous solution of vegetable bouillon paste from a jar.

                          

I added no salt or additional herbs, the object being to see what these things would do.

Generally, soup is very much better a day later, what with flavors melding and all that, but today immediate progress to Stage 4 was a gratifying move. Into each flat soup plate I ladled the sorrel soup and schlagober-ed a goodly blob of crème fraîche.

                           

The soup was a bit salty, probably from the jarred veg base, which I will mix up at 80% of label-directed concentration next time. Stirring the crème fraîche around in it mitigated that defect without masking the delightful lemony sour taste. In fact, the creaminess and the sourness complement each other nicely.

How the stars do align on occasion. Recently I studied a Polish language lesson on the theme of food and dining. The hilarious dialogue was between two people, out for dinner, ordering zupy szczawiowej. And now here it was, the sorrel soup.

When I was a little kid, simpering around with my hair in a pony tail, the relatives took me along on their summer trip to a vacation lodge in Middle-of-Nowhere, Outer Farmworld, run by recent Polish immigrants. Hot cream soup on a 95-degree day thrilled them all but revolted me! Now the stuff is delicious, and we enjoy it on our farm. Perhaps it is the operation of something atavistic.

So, dear friends and relations, what are some of your favorite Polish or Polish-inspired dishes? What brings back fond memories, or engenders the urge to travel to the Old Country? Let us know! You may find that you have fellow food fans among your relatives.

Smacznego!

Ski Down K2? “Nie Ma Problem!”

So this góral named Andrzej Bargiel decided to climb K2 carrying his favorite pair of skis, then ski down. He asked his brother Bartek to bring up the snacks and take the drone footage. His brother said sure.

This was on July 22, 2018; a report made it into the August issue of Polish-American Journal. I was so relaxed and comfortable in my reading chair, despite ink glomming on my fingers from the exercise of turning the pages of the print edition, when this shocking report destroyed the peace of that athletic endeavor.

From the PAJ item:

Andrzej Bargiel, 30, has become the first person to ski down the world’s second-highest  mountain.  With skis in hand, the highlander from Zakopane climbed the 28,251-foot peak and skied back down to base camp intact.

He didn’t  bother with oxygen tanks.

The downhill “run” took him a little over seven hours. When you look at the drone camera footage, you can see that it was seven hours at steepness rating “Ridiculous”.

 Last year, he had attempted the same daredevil feat but had to abandon the bid due to bad weather. . .

There are moments in the footage when cloud obscures everything. What can you do if the cloud settles in for a few days as you sit there on a 45- or 50-degree slope of snow with a crevasse on either side?

. . . Three years ago, Bargiel became the first skier in the world to descend from the nearby 26,295-foot Broad Peak. He has now skied from the summits of five of the 14 highest mountains.

Here is another good compilation of the day’s footage.

The górale of the Tatra Mountains are famed for mountaineering and for the white-wooled sheep they raise. The traditional images are like these:

Nowadays, it’s bye-bye Tatras and hello Karakorums.

It’s a different look.

And there are no sheep to rescue on K2!

Is this nuts?  Of course it is admirable and valuable to pursue excellence and expand its definition. And of course, if someone has skills, he feels compelled to exercise them and perfect them. But suppose you had his talents: would you look around for an application of them that produced immediate practical benefit?  Or would consider it simply a good, even a necessity, to keep up and advance the traditional skills just so one’s descendants can do daring rescue ops on Luna some day? 

What's Ahead for Gene & Clara's

Hi Everybody,

My stars are aligned now in such a way that gives reasonable hopes for taking up the blog again, and sticking with it.

Recently, I've reviewed the list of email addresses for notification of postings and comments. Some of you may receive invitations because I entered an updated email address in a certain little box in Blogger Admin; Blogger automatically extends an invitation to the person at that new address. Please respond if you wish to receive such notifications.

Would someone please send me Kate's email address? Kate should get her own invitation.

Please let me know of any changes desired in this email list.

As always, I have to say that the posts look way better on the webpage compared to an email message. So readers are encouraged to visit eugenezdrojewski@blogspot.com to get the full experience. The sidebar is of interest too, and it can help you use the archives and other features of the site.



Upcoming topics for posts include the following:

1. Further contents of the Photobook, illustrating the scenes related to OSS Team Jackal in China in the early summer of 1945;

2. Chapter-by-chapter summary and review of Mills, Mills, and Brunner, OSS Special Operations in China - the book about Jackal's mission and others in the fight against Imperial Japanese occupation of China;

3.  Marilla - The Experience, as revealed in photos, home movies, sound recordings, and scans;

4. The Baby Boomers of the family;

5. Descendants of the Boomers;

6.  Eclectic topics in other areas, such as cuisine, language study, Polish history, Polish-American history, current events in Poland and Eastern Europe;

7.  Polish movies, art, and literature;

8. Other topics related to family history, for which especially I shall depend on you.

It is easy to post:  I can show you how to do it and authorize you as a poster. It's okay; I still retain plenary powers and can save you from embarrassment, or send you a howler, as indicated. It's all good.

Next up are sound files kindly provided by Marty. Be ready!  I just have to re-learn how to put them up. Some of the things are in Polish, so Polish speakers, get psyched to assist with translation!

Do zobaczenia póżniej!

See you later!

Julianna