The Polish in Pittsburgh.

I lack the precision to be--unlike my wise and measured neighbor, Jenny Jo, a great baker. However, when it comes to mere 'cooking', replete with variables, elbow room, leniency, I somewhat excel. What I also find is that, thanks to Anna Fevola at La Cucina Flegrea, I have learned to construct a decent pot of soup. Her cardinal rule--ironically transgressed with today's recipe, was that one should not use meat in the abridgment of soup.

In my defense I looked to make a more adherent concoction, something equally befitting the third course as the first. Anna simply grabbed the timeliest elements from her cooler, diced them and admitted them to a formulating broth, In the end diners were encouraged to add chilies and grated parmesan to taste. You could sense the garden--well, Claire Engels' fabulous produce grocery, below those faint condiments, who in sum had no better influence on that given ravishing soup than does the swimmer to the toil of the sea. The underscoring effect was always sublime and simple: raddichio, lettuce, squash, cucumber, white beans. It tasted of what it most primitively was.

If I didn't hate her guts so much I'd surely go back to visit, and see her world much as I left it: transcendent.

This brine today qualifies as soup in terms of liquidity alone. Remove the egg noodles and pile on some day-old mashed potatoes and you'd have a quite serviceable Carpathian spin on shepherd's pie. Push the paprika, add beets, and its nearly a goulash. In truth this this has a most unwarranted but unshakable identity crisis to deal with.

I started off with a searing pot, wetted with garlic infused olive oil. Added two diced carrots, one red onion, and about one pound of decent regional kielbasa. In the meantime I deep fried one large potato, sliced in fat steak slabs. Once crisped and cooked through I removed it from the bacon grease and diced. Into the mix. Because I had already condescended to employ meat it seemed pointless not to enrich the base with some beef stock. Don't stab me, I used store bought. The stock lifted the encrusted font from the bottom of the pot, and I added a tablespoon of horseradish, two of brown mustard and about 3/4 cup of prepared sauerkraut. This was summarily topped with enough water to submerge and allowed to simmer at length. While this all happened I boiled off some kluski egg noodles in heavily salted water--they can be added at the moment of completion so as not to derive a gummy starch pool. So too at the last minute did I wilt a head of chopped escarole and some choice herbes fines in the broth.

Once the carrots became fork-tender and the broth firmed to a stewy thickness I stopped the heat. Four hours later it had matured to the photogenic state seen above. Quite good.