Pierogies/Perogies

One evening a few weeks ago, while I was video-chatting with old friends from Vancouver, one of them suddenly excused herself to get her dinner and then proceeded to eat it while chatting. It didn’t look immediately clear to me what it was, so I asked her. When she said it was “perogies!”, I realized why I hadn’t recognized them: it was because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had them or even so much as heard anyone mentioning them since moving to the US!!!!! This was a travesty. I remembered when I used to live with those Vancouver friends and our routine Costco grocery list included bags of perogies, which we would boil and then sauté in butter and bacon, and then no one really made a fuss about it because it was the most normal thing ever. And in my very European high school, the Polish and Ukranian kids would bicker all the time over who really invented perogies (also is it spelled perogies in Canada but pierogies in the US?? who knows). But no one does that in Silicon Valley. At least not in my circles here—I’ve never even heard any of my friends here speak of the dish. I immediately strove to correct that by putting it on my 2020 list.

The entire thing was a bit time-consuming to make—lol I definitely worked the dough a lot more than I kneaded to (haha)—but the process was straightforward enough, and OH MAN the final result was so. so. good. Carbs on carbs on carbs, what more could you want in a dish? For the cheese component in the filling, I was originally just gonna use all shredded Dubliner cheese (because that was what we had on hand), but I decided to follow the recipe’s lead and did 2/3 cream cheese, 1/3 Dubliner. That was a great decision :) The stand mixer also helped make the filling extra-creamy. All in all, a delightful recipe that is fun to make with friends (I’m grateful that my roommates knew what perogies were and did pretty much all the assembling haha! and as you can see in the first photo, they decided to try folding some empanada-style LOL). Highly, highly recommend. I also would recommend watching the YouTube video of the recipe: this Jenny person is so chill and her videos are quite relaxing to watch :)

(original recipe from Jenny Can Cook)