Pierogi

This Christmas, I was inspired to tackle my grandmother's pierogi recipe. When I was growing up, Grandma made pierogi (just like her mother before her) for nearly every family holiday. Unfortunately, as a kid, I didn't like them. I only started to appreciate them when I was around twelve years old - shortly before Grandma stopped making them. She had developed a back problem and kneading and rolling dough became difficult - I filled in as her dough maker for other baking projects, but pierogi just fell off the agenda. We began buying them from my great aunt's church, where an assembly line of elderly Eastern European ladies churned them out for every holiday. When we were unable to get those any more, we bought frozen ones from the grocery store, handmade by a local company. Grandma said that all of these substitutes were just as good as hers and it wasn't worth the trouble of making them herself. I disagreed. I remember how light and soft and delicate her dough was. Few of the pierogi substitutes we found, with their thick, heavy doughs, could really compare.

I had asked Grandma several times to teach me how to make them (since most of her "recipes" are of the oral, learn-by-doing sort), but she maintained that it wasn't worth the effort. This past Thanksgiving, though, I managed to run the end-around on her - I was expressing my frustration at this state of affairs to my mother when she remembered having a written version of the recipe on hand. We found the recipe card and I took it home, giddy with the excitement of making my family's favorite holiday treat the way it ought to be made.

Of course, this was easier said than done. I felt that I had enough cooking experience under my belt that I could handle this on my own. I was wrong. My first attempt yielded a tough, rigid dough. I actually had bruises on my hands from pressing so hard with the rolling pin. With great effort, I rolled out my dough, cut out circles and passed them over to Jeff to fill. Every time I rerolled the scraps, the dough became stiffer. Still, I was encouraged by the adorable little semicircles of goodness appearing on the baking tray beside me as Jeff filled and pinched them. They looked right - of course they would be delicious!

That thought lasted until we tried some for dinner. They were tough, dry and unappetizing. I gave in and called Grandma, who gave me a few key tips (after repeatedly insisting that this is something that can't be learned from a written recipe). She said the dough should not be difficult to work with (at that point, I had an inkling that I hadn't added enough water). When I happened to ask about how she cut them out (I was having trouble finding a suitable cutter), she dropped the biggest tip of all: hers were not cut. She made the dough into small balls and then rolled each one individually. No need for rerolling scraps, nothing goes to waste. She told me that her mother had used this method back when Grandma was young. My great grandmother was clearly a brilliant woman.

The second attempt went swimmingly. Following Grandma's tips and my own instinct about what went wrong the first time, this batch of pierogi were absolutely perfect. As soon as the first three or four were filled, I had Jeff cook them to test out the dough (if they came out badly, I was prepared to toss the dough and begin again, without wasting any of our filling). When they came out, I could tell by looking at them that they were right. When I tasted mine, I jumped for joy. Jeff had to endure several minutes of me walking around the house, fists in the air, celebrating my victory. I spent a lot of time grinning as we finished the rest of the batch.

Three good things came out of this experience. The first is that I've learned how to make awesome pierogi on my own (ok, the dough was on my own - Jeff helped with the rest). The second is that Grandma has finally offered to give me a tutorial. She wants me to come by some time and make them while she watches and can give me tips - which is exactly what I'd been wanting for years. I guess I just had to demonstrate my determination in order to get it. Finally, my pierogi-making earned me a family heirloom. After hearing how much trouble I had rolling out my dough (even though most of this trouble came from making the dough improperly), Grandma decided to give me her rolling pin. Her rolling pin, picked up at a flea market sixty years ago, is a solid piece of heavy wood. I have never used one that could compare (especially not the flimsy, handles-falling-off model I currently use - see the picture below for a comparison). I knew I would inherit this someday, but it was even better to have her give it to me voluntarily (I'm sure I could have wheedled it out of her, but that's not the same) while she can still enjoy the things I make with it.

Pierogi Dough
My great-grandmother's recipe.

2 c flour
1-2 eggs (the written recipe I got from my mom says 2 eggs, so that's what I used, but Christmas dinner, when Grandma was quizzing me on how I made these, she insisted that she'd always used just 1 egg. I plan on trying it that way next time.)
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 c water (I only got about 1/4 c of water into the dough - possibly because I was using an extra egg)

Mound the flour on your work surface and make a well in the center (like you're making pasta). Add the salt and egg to the well. Carefully begin to mix the flour with the egg, keeping the flour mounded so it doesn't run out the sides. Add the water as you knead (in trying to add enough water during my second attempt, I made the dough into a slimy mess. I just floured my hands to keep them from sticking and continued to knead. After a few minutes, the liquid incorporated itself and the dough was perfect. If it looks bad, just press on and see what happens before making any changes.) Continue to knead until well mixed. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes under a damp tea towel.

Break off a small ball of dough to roll out and cover the rest with the damp towel.

Roll the ball into a rough circle, between 1/8" and 1/16" thick (mine were thin enough that I could just see the pattern in the marble through them. If they're too thin, they will break when cooked, so don't go any thinner than that). Repeat with the rest of the dough. (If you're going solo, fill each dough circle immediately, before it dries out. It's much better to have an assistant or two who can handle the filling.)

Fill each circle with about 1 tbsp of filling (of course, this amount could change depending on the size of the circles you rolled). Fold the dough over the filling and pinch the edges closed with your fingers (we like to pinch ours two or three times - if they're not fully closed, they will break as they're cooked). Set aside.

At this point, they can be frozen. We just set them right onto baking trays and froze them raw, removing them later to ziplock bags. While this worked well, Grandma insists that they ought to have been parcooked beforehand. If you'd prefer this method, boil them for 2-3 minutes before drying well and freezing on trays.

To cook, place pierogi in a rapidly boiling pot of salted water. Cook until they rise to the top and the dough is sort of ripply. They can be eaten as-is, or dried off and subsequently fried in butter. One recipe made about 40 for us - the number will depend on the size of the little balls you roll.

Fillings: Pierogi can be filled with anything you'd like (I've seen some combinations in Polish shops that looked pretty strange to me - I'm mystified by blueberry pierogi). In my house, we always stuck with two of the most traditional: potato and sauerkraut. The potato filling is really just mashed potato. To prepare for our pierogi-making, Jeff made a big pot of mashed potatoes with some goat cheese and dill. Then we fried some onions in butter and mixed them with the potato. Measurements don't need to be exact here - just make it taste good. If there are leftovers, eat them. For the sauerkraut, we fried some onions in butter and added 1-2 cups of drained sauerkraut (you don't want it soggy) to the pan until heated and combined. Grandma tells me that you can do the same thing with raw cabbage, if you'd prefer.

Cabbage and Leek Gratin with Mustard Cream

We're in full-fledged Christmas mode around here. I wanted to get all the decorations up this week, but I couldn't bear to decorate a dirty house. We've been skimping on the cleaning for a while now - a deep clean is overdue. My solution has been taking the house one room at a time, cleaning really well, then decorating as we go. So far we've tackled . . . three rooms. One of them was the kitchen, though, so I consider it a triumph. The Christmas tree just went up and will be decorated later tonight, so we'll have to handle the rest of the rooms later in the week. However long it takes, I am determined to have everything sparkling before Christmas.

A clean, festive house requires comfort food, doesn't it? But if you're anything like me, you're probably trying to avoid too much heavy winter fare. There will be enough time for splurging and treats at all the holiday parties that are coming up - in between, we need to keep things light. This is a great meal for that. Despite its name, this gratin is cheese-less. I've lightened up the dairy called for in the original recipe, so the final result is a healthy but satisfying dinner option.

Cabbage and Leek Gratin with Mustard Cream
Adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Suppers.

1 1/2 lb green cabbage, chopped into bite-sized chunks
3 large leeks, sliced into half-moons
1/3 c flour
1 c skim milk
1/3 c fat free Greek yogurt
3 eggs
3 tbsp dill, chopped
1 small shallot, minced
1 1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
2/3 c fat free Greek yogurt
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp prepared horseradish
salt

Preheat oven to 350° F and lightly coat a 6 c gratin dish with cooking spray.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add cabbage and leeks. Boil for 5 minutes, drain in a colander and press out remaining water. Return the cabbage mixture to the empty pot.

Whisk together flour, milk, yogurt, eggs and herbs, then add to the cabbage and leek mixture. Sprinkle with 3/4 tsp salt and fold together with a rubber spatula.

Transfer to prepared dish and bake 45 minutes, until firm and browned.

Meanwhile, mix the shallot and vinegar in a small bowl with 1/8 tsp salt and let stand for 5 minutes. Add yogurt, mustard and horseradish. Mix well to combine, then serve with gratin.

(If any of you end up trying the mustard cream, let me know what you think! I think it tastes exactly like the sauce Burger King uses on the Whopper. Who would have thought that pickled shallots were the secret ingredient?)

Festive Summer Cabbage Salad

Summer isn't over until you let it be over. As long as you can manage to wear your shorts and flip flops, use your grill and eat dinner outside on the deck, summer is still around.

Even though the calendar says September, summer vegetables haven't dropped off the map. Throwing them together in a salad like this one will keep you in a summery mood for a few more weeks. I put this together when I was inspired to try fresh lima beans from the farmers market. I associate lima beans with icky, mushy frozen vegetable mixes from the grocery store. Fresh ones are much nicer. The texture is firm and pleasantly beany. I'm definitely a convert.

This salad came from my endeavor to find something to do with my lima beans. I decided to make a succotash recipe I found in my Southern Living Farmers Market Cookbook. But that salad was just lima beans and corn, and I had a lot of vegetables in my fridge that wanted to be used. So I threw in a red Hungarian pepper (my favorites!) and a tiny, baseball-sized head of red cabbage. The result was a beautiful mixture of colors and textures - the sort of dish that just makes me smile. (Note: it's best eaten as quickly as possible, because the red cabbage will start turning all of those other pretty colors purple by the next day!)

Festive Summer Cabbage Salad
Adapted from the succotash salad in the Southern Living Farmers Market Cookbook.

1 c fresh lima beans
2 ears corn
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp hot sauce
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
3 tbsp fresh chives, chopped 
1 red pepper, diced
3 cups red cabbage, chopped (from one tiny head)

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add lima beans and cook 17 minutes. Add corn to the pot and cook another 3 minutes, until corn is heated and beans are tender. Remove the corn, drain the beans and rinse under cold water (to stop the cooking).

In a large bowl, whisk together oil, lemon juice, hot sauce, salt and pepper. Slice the corn kernels off the cobs and add them to the bowl with the beans, chives, peppers and cabbage. Toss well to combine and coat everything with some dressing. Serve room temperature or chilled.

Pork Wasabi Tacos

Let me let you in on a little secret: I cook all sorts of delicious things that I don't share with you.

It's nothing personal. Really. While I do love my blog and love to share the wonderful things we cook, there are some days when I just don't feel like snapping photos of every step, trying to make my kitchen look pretty in the background (this usually fails - there's no hiding the ugly green counter top). Other days, I plan to blog about a recipe, get all excited for it, and the photos are blurry or the recipe turns out badly. Finally, on a few rare occasions, I have made a delicious recipe, taken lovely pictures, loaded them into blogger and left them there to rot. Some day, I promise, you will hear about the amazing pork schnitzel Jeff made back in the fall. Pinky swear. This recipe is one of the latter. I have made the effort to drag it up out of the archives, dust it off and present it to you now, with plenty of summer grilling season left for you to try it out.

This is one of those dishes where everything comes together in blissful harmony: hot pork meets cool cucumber, crunchy cabbage butts up against a soft flour tortilla, sinus-clearing wasabi washes over the sweet hoisin glaze. The biggest bonus? It takes no time at all to pull together. Put the super-thin strips of pork on the grill, whisk together the five-ingredient sauce, slice a few veggies, remove the pork, assemble the tacos, done. That leaves you more time to get back to the important things, like enjoying the summer evening. There's nothing wrong with being a little lazy in the summer.

Pork Wasabi Tacos
Adapted from Better Homes and Gardens summer 2010.

1-1 1/2 lb pork tenderloin, cut into thin strips
1/3 c hoisin sauce
6 flour tortillas
2 tsp wasabi paste
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 head Napa cabbage, chopped
2 carrots, shredded
1/2 cucumber, thinly sliced

Marinate pork in hoisin sauce.

Thread onto skewers and cook on grill over medium heat for 2-3 minutes a side, turning once. 

Meanwhile, combine wasabi, water, oil, vinegar and sugar in a small bowl and whisk well to combine. Serve pork on tortillas with cabbage, shredded carrot, cucumber slices and a drizzle of wasabi dressing.

Braised Cabbage with Pancetta

Didn't I say we were going vegetarian for Lent? Well, we are. I'm just behind on my posting because I acquired one of these on Sunday:

Her name is Chloe, she is just over a year old, and she cries miserably when you leave her sight. That means that I've been working off my laptop because I feel too guilty to go upstairs to my office. And my camera software is not on my laptop. So I only just uploaded the pictures from the recipe we made on Monday: braised cabbage with pancetta. 

This another great recipe from my Jamie Oliver cookbook. It's fast, simple and flavorful. I've done it twice already and the one thing I need to get right is the shred on the cabbage. While you can use any kind of cabbage, I used half of a small head of green cabbage. The first time, I chopped it with a knife. I tend to chop cabbage poorly - I try to get it nice and thin, but tend to fall far short. So that time we had a nice chunky cabbage mixture. This time, I tried the food processor. 

The cabbage was chopped very evenly, but I felt like the pieces were too small. Ideally, I think I'd like something right in between. Next time, instead of using the shredding ring, I'll try one of the chopping blades and see how it goes.

I think the best part of this recipe was frying the pancetta with shallots and garlic. It filled the whole house with a delicious odor that lingered long after dinner was over. Well worth a try, if only for that!

Braised Cabbage with Pancetta

Adapted from Jamie's Food Revolution.

1 cabbage, finely sliced (the recipe suggests green, Savoy or spring - I used green, and I halved the recipe)

1-2 tsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 shallots, thinly sliced

6 thin slices pancetta, chopped

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tbsp butter

1 1/4 c vegetable stock (I used homemade stock that I froze into ice cubes)

salt and pepper

Heat a large lidded saucepan over medium heat. Once it's hot, add the pancetta to the pan and stir for a few minutes until crisp. Add the shallot and saute for a minute, then add the garlic (at this point, pause and enjoy the aroma).

When the garlic begins to get some color, add the Worcestershire, butter and cabbage. Stir well to combine, then turn heat to high.

Add the stock (since I used my own frozen cubes, I eyeballed the measurement - in retrospect, I think I used a bit too much, because the mixture ended up a bit soupy. A few more minutes on the stove mostly solved that, though). Put a lid on it and cook for 5 minutes. Then remove the lid and cook 5 minutes more. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!

Roasted Cabbage

I don't know about you, but I'm in serious need of some vegetables. I used to be able to go all of Christmas week eating only (or mostly) carbs and sweets. I'm the kind of girl that eats cookies for breakfast when they're available. But in the past few years, when faced with a sugar-carb explosion, I find that my body starts craving something legitimately healthy. I guess I'm getting old.

While we started off last week with an obscene number of cookies in the house, it has been whittled down to a very reasonable level. And not just from us eating them - we managed to bring cookies places and leave them. The problem is twofold: there are a number of varieties of Christmas cookie that I dearly love, and love to bake so I want to do all of them. And new recipes get slipped in alongside old favorites without getting rid of any old favorites. So the number of batches tends to grow. Next year, though, I vow to be smarter and halve some of these recipes. That should keep things under control. Maybe.

So yesterday, after days of cookie overload, I decided we needed a bit more vegetation in our lives and roasted half a cabbage for dinner. This is a wonderful go-to recipe of mine. I found it last year when I was desperately searching for vegetables other than bell peppers and carrots that I might like to eat. I knew I'd eat cabbage in certain preparations, like stir fries and coleslaw without tasteable mayonnaise (did I mention I'm a picky eater?), so I thought I'd give it a shot. It is wonderful. I love the caramelization on the edges of the leaves. Roasting allows the cabbage's natural bite to mellow out a bit, similar to what happens to garlic when you roast it. The leaves are tender and delicate, and the lemon juice brightens it up. It's a winter side dish that feels like a light summer one. A worthy addition to anyone's winter menu.

Roasted Cabbage
Adapted from Martha Stewart Living via Meet Me in the Kitchen blog.

half of a small head of green cabbage (You could do the whole thing, but I find half is enough for us. I put the other half in a zip-lock bag in the fridge and it will keep for well over a week.)

2 tsp olive oil (or more, as needed to coat cabbage)

salt and pepper

2 tsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 450°F. Cut cabbage into wedges - four per half of the head (try to keep some core on every piece - it's what holds the wedges together. Otherwise they'll fall apart when you move them). Brush them with olive oil and season.

Spread on a foil-lined baking sheet and place in the oven for 25-30 minutes, turning once halfway through (I used my small oven and they were done five minutes early, so be sure to check on them). Sprinkle lemon juice onto wedges and serve (I forgot the lemon juice last night - while they're great on their own, lemon juice does take them to another level).