Reasons Not to Make Your Own Pierogis

I decided I was going to get creative in the kitchen tonight and make my own pierogis. I should have just gone straight to freezer aisle, but I had already looked up a recipe for "pumpkin sage pierogis," and I decided I could pull it off.

Maybe I just wanted to torture myself. I'm not remotely skilled in the kitchen, unless you count eating as a kitchen skill. I grew up on convenience food. Hamburger Helper, Kid Cuisine, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and microwaveable sliced ham were the staples of my diet. One of my favorite fresh-from-the-freezer meals involved pillowy soft Mrs. T's pierogis, which my dad would sautee with diced onions. I hated the accompanying kielbasa, with its disgusting texture and thick skin, but it was a small price to pay for the chance to eat pierogis. I always wondered about Mrs. T. Was she Mr. T's wife?

After having a go at making pierogis myself, I'm pretty certain she is. First of all, it takes a lot of tough love to coax a pierogi out of a feisty piece of dough. Secondly, I pitied myself for being such a fool. And lastly, paiiiiin.

The first and most difficult step is making the dough. I was halving the recipe, but I was on the phone at the time I was mixing together the batter, so I added two eggs instead of one. Naturally, I am unable to talk and follow a recipe at the same time. It's nearly as difficult as walking and chewing gum, which is why I never chew gum. Anyway, I figured I could balance it out with a little extra flour. The dough took on a dough-like consistency eventually and I left it to set in the fridge for half an hour.

Then I mixed the filling, remembering to halve the canned pumpkin but forgetting to halve the ricotta cheese. So I added the full measure of canned pumpkin, sage, and nutmeg so the filling would taste right. Unfortunately, I now have a container in my refrigerator filled with a canned pumpkin/ricotta cheese mixture that I'm not sure will work with anything else. (And doesn't it sound revolting?)

Now it was time for the fun to begin. I went to roll out the dough, but the dough refused to be rolled. When I removed the rolling pin, the circle of dough shrunk back to its original size like one of those tiny popcorn shirts after you remove it from your body. (Does anyone remember those? I ended up with two of them, but they looked terrible on.) Yes, I may have invented their food equivalent. My dough stubbornly refused to be rolled. After much wrangling and coaxing, I got a piece rolled as thin as I could possibly manage and began cutting out dough circles with a coffee mug. My hands shook as I spooned the filling into my first pierogi. And... it started leaking through a hole I had somehow created in the dough. Clearly this one wasn't going to work out. I chucked it and started afresh. The same thing happened with the next one, but the hole wasn't so bad, so I decided to patch it with a dough band-aid and keep going.

I can't really describe what utter agony it is to fill a pierogi. Sticky dough, slippery pumpkin-ricotta cheese mix... It's just a bad combination. The filling kept squirting out of the sides when I tried to pinch the dough together. But my patience was gone, so I just sealed them up the best I could and moved forward. The recipe I was using was supposed to yield 30, but I ended up with 21 (to be fair, I threw away two plus a little excess dough that could have been one or two more). My pierogis were clearly too thick, but I had been cooking for two hours already and my food was still raw, so I put the pot of water on.



The recipe told me to boil the pierogis ten at a time. I would purportedly know the pierogis were done when they floated to the top, whereupon I was to remove them with a slotted spoon and run them under cold water in a colander. I looked into the pot. My pierogis were like bricks. After about five minutes, I was seriously doubting that any would float to the surface. But after a few more minutes, they began to bob up ever so slightly, one by one. It was actually the most fun part of the whole experience, a bit like magic. The pierogis just seemed to know when they were ready to come out. And they did come out, albeit deformed and with a pockmarked surface.



The last step in this whole circus, after the pierogis dry out a bit, is to sautee them. I put aside enough for my very belated dinner and froze the rest. As the butter melted in the pan, it occurred to me that two and a half hours later, I was at the very same step in the cooking process that I would have been if I had just bought a box of Mrs. T's.



Tomorrow, I'll have the joy of washing half of my cookware and peeling bits of dried dough off of the ceiling, but for now, I just want to enjoy my food. Despite the thickness of the dough, the pierogis actually tasted pretty good. Worth three hours of labor, not including dishes, though? Never.

The thing is, I'll probably forget all about this awful ordeal and attempt it again in a couple of months. Because I like... paaiiin.

Emotional Eating

The hubs is gone out for his last tour on the high seas (er, Delaware River), and I've discovered the perfect food to replace him. I've gone through a heavy rotation of favorite treats, but when my sister was visiting the last time, we had some alfajores. She lived in Argentina for a bit and really wanted to recreate that tasty treat. Unfortunately the alfajores are not so authentic at the MarieBelle Cacao Bar, but since then, I've noticed the Argentinian cookie popping up everywhere around the city.

For those of you who have never heard of an alfajor, it's a sandwich cookie filled with dulce de leche. There can be many different kinds. Here's a visual to get you salivating.



At dinner on Friday night, the hubs and I each enjoyed an alfajor dipped in chocolate. Today at lunch, I found alfajores at an espresso bar two blocks away from the office, these ones with shredded coconut accompanying the dulce de leche inside, and a dusting of powdered sugar on the outside. It's like a whoopie pie, only about ten times better. Note that the dulce de leche ought to be thick and goopy.

Move over, tiny cupcakes, this cookie looks like it's poised to take over this city. Or at least my pantry.

The One With the Dog and the Dental Floss

This past weekend, I was visiting my sister in Chicago and met the two greyhounds she has adopted. The presence of the dogs reminded us of the hijinks of the old family dog, and when we remember her, we always eventually get back to one story; the consummate stupid dog story. It's the best dog story I have, and I've actually had it copywrighted so that nobody in the film industry will steal this brilliant gem of a true story.

When I was growing up, our family had a yellow labrador mix named Sandi. She was mostly a gentle and stupid animal, but when it came to filching food, this dog was a pro. There used to be a picture in the guest room of my grandparents' house of myself and my cousins, aged about 2-4, sitting by the lakeshore with our lunches on paper plates in our laps. Sandi is in front of us, eating my sandwich off of my plate. On another occasion, my father famously left two apple pies to cool on the kitchen counter while we went out to dinner, only to find two empty pie pans on the floor with nary a crumb when we returned.

But this is just to set up my hilarious dog story. Allow me to digress gently and work my way back to it in due time.

At our elementary school, we had a yearly event called Career Day. I can't actually remember any of the presenters, save for one. One girl in my class had a father who was a dentist, and he came every year. The first and second grade presentations were gentle exhortations to brush and floss and I always thought it was pretty entertaining, but when we got to third grade, the man got serious. I can't remember his real name, but I think it was Woodman or something, because we called him Dr. Woody. I awaited the presentation happily because I knew I was going to get a free toothbrush, but soon Dr. Woody started showing slides of teeth with cavities. The images of rotting teeth grew increasingly gruesome as he explained how cavities are formed, and what happens if they're allowed to get worse and worse. He drew diagrams on the board illustrating tooth decay. Dr. Woody identified the common culprits of tooth damage- sugary beverages. I was scared straight and didn't have so much as a sip of soda for the next two years. But we did get gift bags from Dr. Woody with the usual toothbrush, stickers, and mini container of dental floss.

Either my sister or I must have left Dr. Woody's goody bag on top of a small, child-height table when we got home from school that day. We forgot about it. I could think of nothing else except grotesque images of cavity-ravaged teeth at the time.

After dinner that night, we were all in the sun room when Sandi entered, attempting to hack something up. My mother went over to the wheezing dog and saw something hanging from her mouth that looked like a thread. She started to pull. And pull. The dog had her hackles up and made a kind of peanut-butter-stuck-to-the-roof-of-the-mouth movement with her jaws. My mother kept on pulling at it, as the extracted thread began to accumulate on the floor. She was still pulling, and it was ridiculous. The whole family was rolling with laughter. I wish we had had the video camera rolling at the time so I could watch it again. I know we would have won America's Funniest Home Videos. Unfortunately, those were the days when operating a home video camera still required a good twenty minutes of set-up.

There were at least ten minutes of pulling before the end of the string came up. The dog ran out of the room, relieved. We just looked at the pile of thread on the floor and laughed till we cried. It was an entire mini-roll of dental floss unspooled before us. What became of its container, we never found out.