Perogies!

It was hard to anticipate what the worst part about being away for Christmas was going to be. As it turned out, I had such an out-of-the-ordinary spectacular time that it was hard to remember what I was missing at home. Still, when we had our prison Christmas feast on Christmas Eve, I was very aware of the lack of perogies, cabbage rolls, and cubasa. What is a holiday without excessive amounts Ukrainian food?

New Zealand grocery stores do not come stocked with these things like they might be back in Canada. There's sausages, but not proper cubasa. There's dolma, which is rice balls held together with grape vine leaves, but no holopchi. I don't think I could make those things anyways, but I was bound and determined to have some petaheh for the holiday season. With the ridiculous amounts of food we had over Christmas, there was no point in making them. But on New Years Day, I was channeling my Ukrainian heritage more than ever and was full of energy from the amazing evening I had the night before. It was perogy making time. While the kitchen in prison has a lot of cooking utensils, it's still quite sub par to a kitchen I'd own myself. I got the recipe from my aunt Trish, who is basically half professional, and makes the dough in a special food processor.

Made-of-Fail Cooking Utensils

On the other hand, I was dealing with a flimsy plastic mixing bowl, an electric mixer with only one functioning beater, and whatever else I could get my hands on. In terms of the ingredients, I had the cheapest flour I could buy, and real cottage cheese instead of dry because couldn't find any in the store. This made me pretty nervous for how watery the filling would be.

My first attempts at making the dough were quite miserable. The butter was hard even though it had sat out at room temperature, and I was having trouble mixing it with the flour. I felt a bit better when I realized Babas of old wouldn't have had dough machines, so I used knives to mix the ingredients together as best as I could. Eventually, I had a strangely dark lump of dough, ready to be rolled. I'm guessing the colour was from the difference in yolk colours from the eggs here to the ones in Canada.

I made my filling out of potatoes and cheese, and started to fold it all together. It was working. I excitedly called Trish to wish her a Happy New Year, but more importantly to get some praise for my impossible task. Perogies!!
In the end, I had 37 delicious little dumplings in front of me, ready to be devoured. I froze most of them, but boiled up a few to have with some fried onions and sausages. All the inmates tried them and said they tasted good. This may have been because I hadn't stopped talking about making them all day, but I was still on Cloud 9. Little taste of home on the other side of the world.