from What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings
From Julie Van Rosendaal, contributor to What We Talk About provides us with a glimpse into her love of perogies: It’s okay, I think, to adopt other families’ culinary traditions – having not grown up with a Ukrainian baba, I loved having the opportunity to learn the art of perogy making with a friend who learned from her own baba Nettie, who was the type to turn out thousands of them with her crew for a church supper, celebration or fundraiser in Saskatchewan, or just to fill the freezer to feed the extended family from week to week.
Ingredients
Dough:
5 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup canola oil
1 large egg
2 cups recently boiled (very hot) water
Filling:
mashed potatoes
gravy
shredded roasted turkey
grated cheese
crumbled cooked bacon
caramelized onions
sauerkraut
chopped leftover roasted veggies (try Brussels sprouts!)
anything else you can think of
Directions
In a large bowl, mix together the flour and salt. In a smaller bowl, stir together the oil and egg, beating together lightly. Stir into the flour. It will not combine well but keep stirring and working at it until you have a coarse meal, like biscuit dough before you add the liquid.
Pour the hot water into the flour and egg mixture all at once. Immediately start stirring. It won’t look like it’s coming together but keep stirring until it comes together into a somewhat lumpy dough. Cover with a damp tea towel or loosely cover with plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 15 minutes, preferably 30.
To make your perogies, roll the dough out about 1/4-inch thin and cut into rounds with a glass rim or round cookie cutter – or not. You can roll the dough into a long rope, cuts off 1 inch sections and then rolls each ball into a rough circle, thus not wasting any dough nor needing to reroll scraps, which can make dough tough. However you do it, fill each with a small spoonful of filling – mashed potatoes spiked with cheddar or cottage cheese, cooked bacon, or even leftover chicken and gravy – and fold over, pinching the edges to seal.
Freeze in a single layer, then transfer to freezer bags, or cook (fresh or frozen) in boiling water until they float to the surface, then give them another minute. If you like, pan-fry with onions and bacon after they’re boiled and well-drained.
Nada’s Tips & Tricks: My Lithuanian-Polish grandmother would make this for the Orthodox Christmas on Jan 6 – both savoury and sweet perogies would be the star of the show. A lot of love went into these morsels of goodness.
Contents and images used with permission by Julie Van Rosendaal. https://www.dinnerwithjulie.com/recipes/netties-perogies/
