Pierogies in England?

Alright so this post is a little past the date that I did this, but I still wanted to blog about it anyways.

Heaven wrapped in dough...(are you salivating yet?)

This little adventure all started when one of my friends here, Sarah, sent me a link to a recipe on pierogies. Now, if you don't know, I LOVE PIEROGIES. It is one of my favorite foods back at home and obviously they don't make/sell pierogies in England. So when my friend sent me that link, I was going to do whatever it took to make them. We shared the idea with our friend Chelsea, who is of Ukrainian descent and it is a holiday tradition to make them in her family. So instead, she managed to get her family's old recipe that feeds 50-60 people!

50-60 people?? Hmm...We had a decision to make. Either make all the pierogies and freeze them for a later time or...invite people over for a pierogy dinner! Apparently, pierogy-making days in her family are a 1-2 day event, but we decided to make it a 2-3 hour event. Recruiting some help, we decided to get pierogy-makin'!

A plate of pierogies with the famous recipe.

First we had to make the filling, which is basically mashed potatoes with cheese, onion powder (or whatever else you want in it). Then you let the potatoes after you mash them and cheese them up cool down. Whilst the potatoes are being cooled down, then you have to make the dough. Unfortunately, we did not have enough eggs to make the optimal amount of dough, since you are to keep making dough until the filling runs out, but it still worked.

Now in Chelsea's family and probably Ukrainian culture, probably why the pierogies took so long is that the woman of the family would sit around and talk and gossip whilst making them. Trying to keep in historically accurateness, we tried to gossip while making the pierogies, but that was of course a fail.

Back to the pierogies. So after you make the dough, you cut out circles, fill them with the cheesy potato filling and pinch the sides so that they stay closed. Then you put about 10 in at a time into a pot of boiling water and after some time, you fry them on the stove. We decided to fry some with bacon and onions and that was a good choice.

The pierogy-makin' station!

In the end, we made around 40-5o pierogies, so we were pretty close to the end result. About 10 or so people showed up to the event and we ate the pierogies until they were all gone. And of course, we had my favorite pierogy topping...sour cream!!

The group digging into pierogies!

My mouth was salivating writing this blog post...I wish they had pierogies here! Not to worry though, because my friend and I decided we are going to make them over Spring/Easter break. It is an Easter tradition in her family and since we are both going to be here over Easter, why not make them? I'll update you all on part 2 of pierogies in England!