Years ago a friend of mine introduced me to the joy of pierogies and I’ve never looked back. I tried forcing them on Peter but he didn’t really take to them so I’m going to spread the love through blog instead.
Pierogies are a type of dumpling found in any Polski-sklep in the country and possibly under a variety of different spellings. They’re really cheap (about €1.60 for a bag of 15/16) and fairly versatile – they can be eaten for breakfast or dinner depending on your mood. I love them as a breakfast dish and though most of my friends would prefer a good fry I think I would probably choose pierogies most days.
To cook pierogies you boil them in water until they start floating. Stir them occasionally as you’re boiling them as they tend to stick to the bottom of the pot so they won’t float and you won’t know they’re done. You can eat them like that with whatever you want – for dinner we’d often just have some steamed vegetables and sour cream with the pierogies, cheap, quick and easy.
For breakfast, chop up some onion and bacon. Fry the pierogies with the onion and bacon in butter (or oil if you prefer, but they’re tastier with butter!). You can leave it at that or you can add some schwartz chicken seasoning while frying – this is basically just paprika and salt, so you could just add paprika and salt if you don’t have chicken seasoning. Serve with sour cream.
A word of warning for all us non-Polish speaking readers; be EXTREMELY careful what kind of pierogies you’re picking up. We normally get the ‘ruskie’ pierogies – they’re filled with potato and cheese – but one time we thought to ourselves, ‘I know, why don’t we try something different. Shake things up a little, be adventurous. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.’ That was NOT a good idea. Not understanding any of the writing on the packaging we went with the picture which looked misleading like bacon and did not at all prepare us for the sauerkraut surprise. They were foul! And the whole kitchen smelled of bad cabbage for days. We’ve never branched out again.