When I first think of pierogies it brings me way back to when I was a young kid and lived off of Lorain Street in Cleveland, Ohio. I would walk down the street and pass the bars, and believe me there were a lot of bars on Lorain Street. In the windows there would always be a sign – Friday Night Pierogie Special and Beer. Pierogies? But being Italian, that word was an alien one but eventually I would come to recognize it as pure Cleveland. Now, when I walk by a bar or restaurant in Pittsburgh…the signs read Wings and Beer Specials. Times have changed.
I am 100% Italian. I love Italian food. I especially love angel hair pasta with sauce and meatballs and pizza. As a matter of fact, I make a fantastic marinara sauce and outstanding meatballs. I own a pasta machine and made homemade pasta once for two. But it is a tedious job and could you imagine how much dough it would take to make pasta for 11? I bet you do!
My pasta machine is now at my daughter’s catering kitchen. I don’t make pasta dough with it but I have made pierogie dough. I use the machine to make the pierogie dough thin before cutting it into small circles. Growing up in my house my kids always made me buy Mrs. T.’s frozen pierogies, (for my Polish friend, Elaine…I apologize for this). For snacks which seemed like all the time, my kids would pull out the package, sauté onions and add the pierogies, sit down and eat them with gusto!
But yesterday was my pierogie day. I was at my daughter’s kitchen at 9 a.m.and was the last person out of the kitchen at 5:30p.m. In between, I cleaned 8 dozen mushrooms, removed the stems and stuffed 4 dozen with a sausage and cheese filling. The other 4 dozen mushrooms would be stuffed with a savory herb filling later in the morning. I cleaned and ran the dishes through her machine, constantly.
I started on the pierogie dough. It is a basic simple recipe with five ingredients to it, but I had to make five single recipes instead of making five recipes all at once. The dough comes out better if you make single recipes. I placed each single recipe, after it was kneaded, into a bowl, covered, and placed each on the top of the stove to keep warm and to set. Then I made the potato/cheese filling. My daughter set up the machine for me and left the kitchen to go home and take a long nap.
From noon until 5:30, I worked on pierogies. Using the pasta machine, I pulled off medium sized pieces rolled it and put it through the pasta maker three different times. With a small jar top, I made circles and placed the circles on a long sheet tray sprinkled with flour on the parchment so none of the circles would stick. I kept doing this layer after layer of circles with plenty of flour and parchment in between each layer, until the sheet tray was filled.
I checked the master food sheet to see how many pierogies needed to be made - 12 dozen pierogies. I could have placed everything in the Walk In refrigerator, cleaned up and finished my job tomorrow but decided to keep going. I filled each circle with a quarter size of potato/cheese filling and added some water on the seams to pinch them tight into half moons. By 5:15 I was tired but I had finished my job. I put everything away, ran the last tray of dishes, knives, and bowls through the dishwasher, washed off the counters, put on my coat, and thankfully locked up.
Outside, I felt a wave of relief, a sense of accomplishment to go along with my aching feet. I hope the 12 dozen pierogies taste as good as they looked.
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