Fulfilling the desires of my ancestors, pt 2.

So now I'm on this kick of making traditional Polish food, maybe it's because in this new city of mine I lack a Traditional Polish Babcia (TPB) or a mother who can cook these foods for me. To satisfy this kick this weekend I decided to make some pierogi.

I found a recipe online that seemed close to what my TPB and mother make, plus it allowed me to get rid of that cottage cheese that was just sitting in the fridge. The recipe said that it would only take me 40 minutes; things were looking up.

The first problem what I ran into was a lack of white flour in this hippie house, all we had was whole wheat, deciding that my ancestors probably lacked bleached flour to begin with I decided to forge ahead.

After that things went smoothly, although saying that this can be done in 40 minutes is a damn lie. The only stumbling block was when I ran out of dough, and had to resort to using wonton wrappers instead, sometimes living in a hippie house has it's advantages.

So about two hours later, my pierogi we already to be cooked. For those of you that do not know pierogi are first boiled in water, and then pan fried if desired. I like the just boiled kind so I was sticking with that this time.

One of the nice things about this "old style" of cooking is that no one really cares about how fattening anything is, if anything the more fattening something was the better. So after the pierogi are cooked how to you keep them from sticking together? The answer: liberally coat the cooked pierogi in melted butter...mmmmm mmmm.

Finally two and a half hours later my pierogi we all done, so Danielle and I tried them out. Personally I think that they were both great, but Danielle thinks that the whole-wheat flour makes the pierogi shell too tough, and so prefers the wonton pierogi.


Surprisingly the wonton pierogi are quite tasty, and if I were going to make pierogi again and really wanted to make them in 40 minutes, I'd probably just use wonton wrappers rather then making my own dough.

Note to self, purchase wonton wrappers for TPB.