Here is something delicious and sweet on the blog today! I’d like to share with you my kutia recipe – a Polish Christmas dessert. On Thursday we’re going to celebrate our Christmas Eve supper with a group of our local Polish friends. It’s going to be a potluck and everybody is bringing a different traditional dish. Ideally we should have twelve of them (different dishes). I promised to make kutia, which is a traditional Christmas Eve dessert from Eastern Europe. During the holidays you can find it on Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belorussian tables. My family comes from eastern part of Poland, so every year I was looking forward to having this sweet dessert at my grandma’s house. This was one of my favorite of the twelve traditional dishes (it is never made at other times than Christmas), probably because it’s so sweet and yummy…

Easy kutia recipe, Polish Christmas dessert:

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup wheat berries (I got mine from bulk bins at our local Willy Street Coop in Madison)
• 1 cup poppy seed
• 1/2 to 1 cup honey
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• 1/4 cup slivered almonds

OPTIONAL INGREDIENTS:

• 4 figs
• 4 dates
• 4 dried apricots
• 1/4 hazelnuts or pecans
• grated, candied or dried orange peel
• vanilla extract

Here is a photo of all dry ingredients I used for my kutia today…

HOW TO MAKE KUTIA:

1. Rinse wheat berries, cover them in water and soak overnight. Drain, add fresh water and cook until soft (but not mushy), about 2-3 hours. Drain and cool down. I cooked the wheat yesterday and had it ready for preparing the kutia today.
2. Rinse poppy seeds in a sieve, transfer them to a pot, cover with boiling water and cook for 15 min and then drain. They will expand a little while cooking so be generous with the amount of water you use.
3. Next grind the cooked and strained poppy seeds in batches in a coffee grinder until the seeds start to show their white interiors. In Poland people use meat grinder but I don’t have one and the coffee grinder worked just as well. It took about 6 batches to go through all the poppy seeds.
4. Chop the nuts. Soak all dried fruit in hot water for about 15 min and dice if needed.
5. Put all ingredients into a large mixing bowl and add 1/2 cup of honey. You may dilute the honey with a little bit of hot water if it’s too thick. Mix everything together very well. Taste if it’s sweet enough and you may add more honey or more nuts or more dried fruit if you wish. Kutia is a dish where you can easily add/remove/change additional ingredients to suit your individual preference.
6. Refrigerate for at least 2-4 hours. Kutia tastes better on the second or third day after all the flavors blend in with each other.

Here is a photo of everything just before I mixed it all together…

And here you can see how it looks after it’s all done!

Kutia is just one of many dishes that are served only for Christmas. And if you’d like to learn more about Polish holiday traditions you can check out this short BBC video on YouTube. I want to wish you the season filled with your favorite things and lots of reasons to smile! Thank you for reading this and see you on the blog in 2016!

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