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.