Posts Tagged With: Soviets

Polish Entree

PIEROGIES

INGREDIENTS

2 potatoes
1/2 cup cheddar cheese (or already grated)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 onion

2 tablespoons butter
4 1/2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon salt (1/4 teaspoon more later)
4 teaspoon olive oil

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon parsley
1/4 cup sour cream

To prepare filling: Peel potatoes. Cut potatoes into 1″ cubes. Mince onion. Boil potatoes on high heat for 20 minutes. Drain water. Use potato masher or fork to mash potatoes. Grate cheese. Add potato, cheese, onion, salt, and pepper to large bowl. Use fork to mix ingredients together.

To prepare dough: Let butter soften. Add butter, flour, eggs, sour cream, salt, and olive oil to large mixing bowl. Knead ingredients into a soft dough. Divide dough into 3 lumps and cover with wax paper for 10 minutes.

Sprinkle flour on flat surface and on rolling pin. Roll the dough in a circle 1/4″ thick. Use 3″ wide glass to make 3″ circles.

To assemble: Place 1 tablespoon of filling in the center of each dough circle. Fold dough over to make a half moon. Seal edges with the tines of a fork.

Add enough water to large pot to cover pierogies. Add 1/4 teaspoon salt. Boil water. Add pierogies. Boil for 8 minutes or until pierogies float.

Skip this step if you don’t give your pierogies a golden-brown crust. Add softened butter to pan. Add 6 pierogies at a time to pan. Sauté pierogi on each side on medium-high heat for about 2 minutes or until golden brown. (Just saying golden brown puts you halfway down the path to being a chef.) Remove pierogies from pan.

Garnish pierogies with sour cream and parsley.

TIDBITS

1) Other types of pierogies have garlic in them.

2) In 1986, French and Soviet spacemen quarreled over garlic. The French would not go into space without garlic. The Soviets complained about garlic’s bad smell and refused to allow it onto the space station. Did the world come close to war? I don’t know.

3) Garlic has been thought by many over the centuries to ward off vampires.

4) Perhaps the French though the Soviets were sending their vampires into space.

5) For decades, the Soviets sent their political undesirables into the gulags of Siberia.

6) Vampires are about as undesirable as people get and since space stations are farther from Moscow than Siberia, I understand the Soviets wanting to send their vampires into outer space.

7) And I totally understand the French government not wanting its astronauts to come back as vampires to infect the entire country because they were bitten by cosmonaut vampires.

8) I always have garlic in my home to ward off Russian vampire spacemen. Better safe than sorry, I always say.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.