The Christmas holiday season truly is one of my favorite times of the year. I enjoy the chance to pause and reflect with friends and family. I enjoy giving gifts and repeating traditions (some silly) year after year. And perhaps most of all, I enjoy the food. And of all the food I enjoy, bigos is my favorite.
Bigos is - as I understand it - the general term for Polish Hunters Stew. I learned about it and learned to love it from Meg shortly after I first met her. Her family has roots in Poland and through a combination of family lore and modern tradition, Meg started making this wonderful dish during the Holidays. These days, as Meg is a vegetarian, the bigos is part of a holiday hiatus where tradition trumps health concerns and we indulge in several meat dishes.
Bigos is - as I understand it - the general term for Polish Hunters Stew. I learned about it and learned to love it from Meg shortly after I first met her. Her family has roots in Poland and through a combination of family lore and modern tradition, Meg started making this wonderful dish during the Holidays. These days, as Meg is a vegetarian, the bigos is part of a holiday hiatus where tradition trumps health concerns and we indulge in several meat dishes.
As I understand it, the specific recipe for bigos is mostly dependent on what the hunters bring home. Ours is adapted from an adaptation of a recipe The Best of Polish Cooking and includes pork, kielbasa, bacon, lots of cabbage and sauerkraut, mushrooms, red wine and ... you get the idea. You cook the main ingredients down for several hours before it gets finished with a sort of tomato and mushroom roux. The recipe calls for it then to be chilled overnight and reheated adding fresh red wine before serving. It also says it peaks around the third day!
Meg asked me today when we had this year's bigos - reheated for lunch - how this batch compared to previous years. The bigos had just been reheated for the second time; I replied it was the best ever!
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