Hi, I'm Kasia — founder of MUUS, a bakery and café, and these days Slowhop's copywriter, content creator and the friendly voice behind our social media. Food and I have always got on well (I spent ten years feeding Warsaw's sweet tooth), and kitchen life is basically my middle name. Travel excites me just as much, so putting the two together felt obvious. I found Janek on Instagram, where he was going on dates with soups. It was the moustache that won me over. It didn't take me long to ask him out... on a date with Slowhop. And here we are.
Chaos in the kitchen is his middle name. The first one is Jan. He has perfected the art of imperfect cooking and makes whatever he happens to fancy that day. A sharp jawline, balanced out by a second chin, the way lemon zest balances the butter in a beurre blanc. Knows a great deal about soup. His type: girls shorter than him, or slightly taller. He's a little over two metres (six foot seven-ish). Hasn't measured himself in a while, to be fair.
Instead of hours over the stove, we're playing with flavour. These are Janek's quick, very good recipes — the kind you can make between a nap in a deckchair and staring at the trees. We mix whatever grows within arm's reach with a few local classics. You don't need to be a MasterChef finalist. You don't even need the moustache.
Ingredients
a cup of couscous (250 ml)
broad beans
radishes
spring onion
a handful of mint
a handful of radish leaves
juice of half a lemon
a teaspoon of sugar
hazelnuts
It is worth keeping couscous at your Slowhop, or at the allotment. Obviously. A grain that is ready in three minutes needs no defending in surroundings like these.
1. Cover the couscous with boiling water to about 2 cm above the grain, throw in a handful of hazelnuts and put a lid on it.
2. Boil water in a pan. Drop in the broad beans, lift them out after 3 to 5 minutes, run them under cold water and slip them out of their skins once they have cooled. Into the bowl.
3. Now for the good, healthy, colourful part. Chop the spring onion into 2–3 mm pieces and slice the radishes as thinly as you can manage (as thin as possible, but without taking a finger off — we know what the knives in holiday cottages are like). Into the bowl. Chop the mint and the radish leaves finely. Into the bowl. The peeled broad beans? Into the bowl. And the couscous, once it has soaked everything up… you will never guess. Into the bowl.
4. Now season it. Lemon, salt, pepper and maybe a little sugar. Add a bit at a time, stir hard, taste constantly and keep adjusting until it is right. It should be slightly sharp and refreshing.
5. Slice the nectarine very thinly, lay the slices out on a plate and spoon two or three tablespoons of couscous on top.
SERIOUSLY, THIS IS SO GOOD
Somewhere in Mazovia, where wild strawberries hide in the grass and hares slip between the meadow and the trees, stand two wooden houses for people who miss the quiet. Joanna and Krzysztof have built a place whose name nods to Ingmar Bergman's film and invites you to slow down for a while, or simply to think a little less often. The interiors combine Japanese minimalism with Scandinavian warmth, seasoned with the Polish Poster School and a few design classics. Every detail here has weight, and a calm of its own.
The heart of both houses is the shelves full of books and magazines: Polish and international fiction, poetry, reportage, and a whole shelf on what a forest does for your head. You can read anywhere — in bed, on the sofa, in the window seat looking out at the trees, in a hammock or on the enormous terrace. When it gets dark, switch on the projector. There is a screen in each house, and in summer the film moves outdoors, because you can see a very great many stars from here.
Real life, though, happens on the terrace: forty square metres of it, with a big table where everything that matters takes place. Breakfast with the birds, the gas grill lit and the cooking moved outside, and in the evening a pack of cards and a game of makao, the Polish version of crazy eights, until someone runs out of jokes. During the day the area is yours: into the forest by bike, a walk along the wild Jeziorka river, or lunch at Młyn Osieczek looking out over the reservoir. Ten kilometres (about six miles) away, the Dwórzno vineyard runs tastings led by a sommelier.
And to finish, straight into the wood-fired hot tub at Poziomka 2, which smells of the forest. Sink into the warm water, look up at the sky and allow yourself to be in no hurry at all.
