Our Traditional Diet

This week I made probably my favourite food in the entire world...  perogies or if your Mennonite: wareneki or Ukrainian: pierogi.  I was inspire by the book  In the Defence of Food by Michael Pollen,  he mainly argues that we should eat whole food cooked in the traditional way, and if we are going to go to the work of making something from scratch we should thoroughly enjoy eating it.
So I made my favourite, both Ben and I grew up with perogies made by our grandmothers and mothers so I am going to share the mixture of the 2 traditions (although they are very similar)

First off the easiest dough from Ben's Mom:
1 500ml tub of FULL FAT sour cream
4 cups of flour
a pinch of salt

mix about 3 1/2 cups(or so) of flour into the sour cream, mix until nice dough, not to sticky, use the rest of the flour for rolling out dough, let dough sit for 10-20 mins the longer you let it sit the easier it is to roll out.
Get filling ready, We like DRY cottage cheese (600ml will do the trick) 1 egg and salt and pepper
but I have also done a Ukrainian style with left over cheesy mashed potatoes, that was super yummy too, also my grandma often put saskatoon's, or peaches, and I have heard prune plums (more on those later) or sour cherries, really you could go nuts and put whatever you wanted in

Roll out dough until 1/4inch thick

I have a fancy "perogie cutter" from pampered chef but a big cup would work just as well, or just cut you dough in squares and fold them over... I think every perogie maker has her (his) own method, when my grandpa retired he used to cut the circles while grandma filled them, I cut my circle, pick it up, put filling in and pinch

place on floured cookie sheet

Once you are done forming your perogies ( I find it makes 50ish, and takes about an hour) I usually freeze half if I am just feeding us and through the other half into boiling water for about 3-5mins or until they are all floating (longer if cooking from frozen)

What does one eat with a perogie? Well homemade sausage is my favourite,but bacon or a good  Mennonite style sausage also does the trick, fry this meat up in a pan so that cream gravy can be made with your meats drippings, once your meat is done add an onion, brown it a bit then add about a cup of FULL FAT cream and let it simmer until it thickens add salt and pepper (my friend makes a super good gravy with tons of herbs in as well but we like to stick with tradition around here)

Ben's mom has always served prune plum sauce as well (freeze prune plums in the summer and throw them in a pot with 2 tbsp of honey and thicken with cornstarch)

My mom and Grandma would serve perogie with bread crumbs fried in butter but every time I try to do that I nearly burn the house down...

Our favourite meal!!

We always hope for leftovers so we can fry them up the next day, and the plum sauce is so good in yogurt  So I say the work is worth it, and don't try and make this meal "more healthy" by using low-fat products, just don't make it that often...