Tag: eastern european

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Cooking Food General Recipes

How to Eat Delicious Homemade Pierogies Part II

Remember my earlier post about how to cheer yourself up on a cold gray winter afternoon by eating some delicious pierogies? In that post, I suggested heating up some classic pierogies on a pan and topping them off with some irish cheese and oregano. Well here is an alternate way to be lazy AND eat pierogies that proved to be equally delicious:

Homemade pierogiesIf you want to re-create this, here’s how you go about it. First get your polish Nana to make you some pierogies. If you don’t have a polish Nana, and your best friend or partner doesn’t either, go buy some from an eastern European store. Alternatively, figure out how to make some (or wait until I write about it) and then freeze them (by individually wrapping them in plastic/cling wrap and then throwing them all in a big freezer bag).

Next, melt some unsalted butter in a pan and heat the pierogies up. I recommend covering the pan at first and setting the flame on low so that the insides of the pierogies can cook. Then take off the lid and raise the heat slightly to toast the outsides of the pierogies a little. Place the pierogies on a plate and then caramelize some thin slices of white onions in the same pan.

The next step is garnishing the pierogies. Begin by sprinkling some freshly ground pepper on top followed by the caramelized onions. Then grate some Irish Dubliner cheese on top. I know, it sounds odd and inauthentic, but it works very well, better than parmesan, cheddar or pecorino (I tried all three). This cheese is sharp, so it complements the relative blandness of the pierogies. And anyway, anything Irish and anything with potatoes go together in my book 😛 The final touch was a sprig of basil freshly picked from our indoor herb garden:

Indoor herbsHere’s the end product:

PierogiesAgain, I feel I must clarify that I don’t generally take short cuts like this. This dish was something I resorted to on the day I returned from Panama. I’d been on a long flight and I was far too exhausted to cook up something; this was an extenuating circumstance. Normally, I tend to cook up fresh meals from scratch and have been known to make Paneer butter masala, brownies and even truffles in the wee hours of the morning. But we all have those days when we need to cut corners and this post is about how to embellish even a short cut meal so it tastes and looks delicious 🙂

Categories
Cooking Food General Recipes

How to Eat Delicious Homemade Pierogies

An alternate but equally fitting title for this post would be: How to Cheer Yourself up on a Cold, Wet, Gray Winter Afternoon. You’ll see why if you read on.

I was at home, sitting on the couch, trying to bring myself to work, do some yoga, or just be productive in some way. And I just couldn’t. It was dreary outside; we’d had snow early in the morning, but by now all the snow had melted into sludge. The sun was nowhere to be seen and I was generally feeling bloody awful, pardon the cussing. I hadn’t even the energy to cook! Can you imagine that? “I ALWAYS have the energy to cook, bake etc” I muttered to myself, half heartedly. I was, you see, even too tired and bored to be dramatically panicked by this laziness; I was also too tired to be dramatically panicked by my lack of dramatic panic. This, when I am the sort of person who uses exclamation points more than any other form of punctuation! See what I mean!

Anyway, I found the answer! Delicious homemade pierogies! You see, pierogies freeze well and I happened to find a couple in the freezer. They were basic or classic pierogies, stuffed with potatoes and cheese, made by a friend’s super sweet and part-polish Nana. So I promptly melted some unsalted butter in a pan and heated the pierogies up. I covered the pan at first and set the flame on low so that the insides of the pierogies could cook. Then I took off the lid and raised the heat slightly and toasted the outside a little.

Finally the garnish: I sprinkled some freshly ground pepper on top and then grated on some Irish cheese, Dubliner to be precise. I know, it sounds odd and inauthentic, but it works very well. This cheese is sharp, so it complements the relative blandness of the pierogies. And anyway, anything Irish and anything with potatoes go together in my book 😛 The final touch was a sprig of fresh oregano.

Here’s the end product:

I shall make pierogies myself one of these days, mushroom and cheese ones, and then I shall write all about it.