Xi's game

My jar of vegan flaczki has been eyeing me for the last four months. It sits in my fridge, large, round and imposing, filled with a lumpy gray mixture. Flaczki is tripe soup, a traditional Polish concoction of broth, herbs, spices, vegetables and guts. Poles adore the stuff. It is warming and hearty. An unimpressed friend once described it as ‘elastic-band stew’. My vegan flaczki contains mushrooms instead of tripe. I bought it for a lark. My Polish friends thought it funny that a modern, progressive twist was being put on a firmly traditional dish. I am a vegetarian, but every time I think about eating my vegan flaczki, I think again. Traditional Polish food is warm, rich and meaty. Roulada, for example, is a meat roll stuffed with, among other things, more meat.

Cape Cod winters are brutal: they are long, freezing cold and windy. Cape Codders don’t know what spring is. The Pilgrims, having first touched terra firma in Chatham after months at sea, headed across Massachusetts Bay for Plymouth to more shelter. Days jump from those when Cape Codders think that Old Man Winter has played a nasty trick on them once again, to days of suddenly delicious warm sun which breaks through feathery skies, filled with what my father Bob called ‘unused air’. One of my dearest memories of spending a winter living in Chatham’s Old Village is of my father, Bob, in mid-May, appearing in his 10-foot skiff putt-putting out of the Mill Pond past our house, wearing his salt-laden floppy hat, heading for Stage Harbor to do some clamming.