Monday 3 March 2014

Perogy making for beginners

A big part of any ethnic culture is the food, and Mennonite culture is no exception. Growing up on a dairy farm, we always had an abundance of milk and cream, including sour cream, whipping cream, cottage cheese, cream for making butter, etc., while a chicken coop full of hens kept us well supplied with fresh eggs.

With all that fresh farm goodness, it was no wonder that my mom turned out delicious Mennonite dishes like wareneki and kielke with schmaundt fat, not to mention amazing breads and pastries like zwiebach, paska, portzelky and perishky. Just listing these delicacies is making my mouth water.

The other day, I got an e-mail from my brother, Bert, asking if I'd like to join him in making perogies. He had recently discovered dry curd cottage cheese at a Hutterite colony while at his job picking up milk from dairy farms. Seeing those bags of dry cottage cheese immediately made him nostalgic for perogies -- or "glums wareneki" as we called them in Low German.

Neither Bert nor I had ever tackled perogy making before. We had made paska (Mennonite Easter bread) together in the past, and that turned out great, so I guess we felt confident we could master perogies as well. We found the recipe and detailed instructions complete with pictures on the Mennonite Girls Can Cook website and got to work.


Bert mixed up the dough which, thanks to a full cup of sour cream in it, turned out beautifully soft and smooth.


While the dough cooled in the fridge, he mixed up the cottage cheese filling with an egg yolk, salt and pepper. Easy enough so far. I took the first crack at rolling out the dough and then began adding the filling.
 
This is where things got tricky.
 
 
Our conversation went something like this:

"The trick is not to get the filling between the layers of dough that you're trying to pinch together."

"I think the cottage cheese mixture needs another egg in it to make it stick together better."

"How on earth do women make dozens of these at a time?!"

 
 
In the end, we were pretty pleased with our results. Bert kept about 2/3 of them for himself and his wife, Barb, while I took the remainder home with me. I fried up some farmer sausage for supper, then sautéed some onions in the sausage drippings, and then added butter and sour cream to the pan to make a cream gravy (schmaundt fat).
 

 

As you can see from the photo, I was pretty generous with the gravy. Oh my goodness, what a delicious treat!

 

5 comments:

  1. LOVE THIS and I wanna share a plate with you. Dwayne's mom taught us how to make her style, but I've never done it on my own and I know it takes a lot of patience. I'm so proud of you two.

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    1. Thanks Marilyn, it was great fun doing it together with Bert. Would love to share a plate of it with you!

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  2. Great job. The girls and I have done perogy saturdays (because that is how long it take me).

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  3. Looks Delicious !!!!!
    Why wasn't I invited for the "eating" part ??? HAHA

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    1. Sorry, I don't invite anonymous people for dinner. :-)

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