Channeling my inner eastern European...

Mrs. Elle and I embarked upon an afternoon of pierogi making on Monday. Perhaps to celebrate the presidential inaugural or perhaps because we like to kill our backs. Either way...we made some pierogi(s).

First, Mrs. Elle models her fashionable apron as we begin to make the pasta dough in the lovely Kitchenaid.


Here is said dough - flour, water, eggs, margarine. Fairly straight forward. This blob made about 8 dozen (ish) pierogi. Now it rests.


Meanwhile, we played with the potato filling - 5 lbs of potatoes, 2 bricks of cream cheese, a stick of margarine, salt, and pepper. Very simple. V. not low fat.

I skipped about a billion pics at this point - we had a pasta roller to roll out the dough, which was KEY. Here is Mrs. Elle stuffing the sauerkraut pierogi. They were tart.



Here are some of our creations awaiting their turn in the boiling water.



Post boiling water - dribbling yucky innards onto Elle's kitchen table.


We had to try one - Elle availed herself of melted butter as a dipping sauce. Kind of like lobster I guess.


Meanwhile, back home at my casa (notice the Kroger root beer?), I pan fried some of these puppies up - here are some kraut ones (segregated from Mr. R's portion because he is afraid of the kraut)


And some of the less perfect looking potato pierogi -having been flipped in the frying pan, are now coasting to a light crispy state.


These were pretty good - the kraut, as I said, were a bit tart. Mrs. Elle also made cheese filled pierogi (cottage cheese, egg, onion, salt, pepper) and they weren't my thing as compared to the potato which are the ultimate in pierogi goodness in my book. It was a fun day (apart from the back killing) and I hope the recipients of the pierogi are pleased with our efforts.