Easter

Easter pierogi have become a tradition for us on parr with Cadbury eggs, Easter Parade, and the butter lamb (more on him later.) For the last several years we've tackled our beloved Martha's pierogi recipe with varying degrees of success. This year, I'm proud to say, was the best yet! We busted out the old standards- potato and potato with cheese, but also went for some new varieties. We tried to recreate the famous arugula and goat cheese pierogis from Veselka, and tackled another Martha favorite- blueberry.

Martha's recipe can be found here, and we followed it exactly to make the dough.

We sort of winged it with the fillings, but used Martha's potato filling as a jumping off point. For the potato cheese, we just added a liberal amount of a good quality cheddar to the already completed potato mix. We improvised completely with the arugula goat cheese filling, which probably explains why they came out less than perfect. We had plans to get a schmancy goat cheese, however we forgot to pick it up and were left with our local grocery store's “herbed goat cheese blend.” The “herbed” flavor was definitely too overwhelming for the pierogi. Additionally, we probably should have thrown the arugula goat cheese mixture into the food processor to make a smoother filling. Oh well, there's always next year!

Our other experiment, blueberry, came out much better. Neither of us had ever eaten a sweet pierogi before, but we were pleasantly surprised with the results. We took our inspiration from Martha's recipe again, but made a much smaller batch since we weren't sure how they would turn out. We sort of threw some blueberries in a bowl, mushed up half, and then added sugar until it was sweet enough. Voila, blueberry pierogi! Next Easter we will be making a full batch for sure.

But back to the dough. We ran into trouble last time around because we were afraid of over-flouring the dough and making it tough. This year, we flour-ed to our heart's content and had a much better result. We used a metal tumbler to cut out the circles (another Martha trick- damn she's good!) and then added a spoonful of filling. Then we just folded them over and sealed with a fork.

We cooked them up on the flat top with a liberal amount of butter provided by our fallen butter lamb.

Which brings us to the butter lamb. If you've never seen a butter lamb, it is just what it sounds like - a lamb made of butter. Butter lambs are a polish Easter tradition, especially popular in Western New York. Anyone who has visited the Broadway Market can attest to their popularity at the Easter table. I purchased a traditional hand carved wooden mold this year with the intention of making a butter lamb to beat all butter lambs. Unfortunately he didn't quite make it out of the freezer in one piece.

I'm going to do a few practice rounds next Easter so you can look out for the prettiest butter lamb you've ever seen next holiday season!

The final meal included some quickly sauteed asparagus, carmelized onions, and some sour cream.