Death By Food - Not Quite

The first time I invited Hubby over for Christmas Eve dinner he fully expected to die from food poisoning of the Ukrainian variety. That is, too much starchy, heavy food that includes grains that were either sickly sweet or mushy. And don't get me started on the pickled fish or sauerkraut and peas.  Death by Food, that's what Hubby called it.

Then he ate the meal, all 12 courses.  Ate would be an understatement.  Devoured is more like it. And he lived to tell the tale. Rather, he lived to tell me that I was crazy and that Christmas Eve dinner was a fantastically delicious meal.

Christmas Eve dinner always starts with Borscht - that classic red beet soup. The next few dishes are, well, something I can't stand (Kutia and Kasha), but the borscht always made me happy.  Except when we ate my Baba's soup and she put peas in it. In honour of Ukrainian Christmas on the 6th I wanted to share this recipe.

This recipe does not include peas.  Thank goodness for that.  Borscht is essentially a beet based vegetable soup.  You can add in other veggies, but I stick to adding beets and a few carrots to onions, celery, and garlic. A browse through any Ukrainian church cookbook will turn up a variety of recipes claiming to be Russian style or Dukhobor style.  I can't speak to them, but potatoes do not belong in borscht as far as my family is concerned. My Baba also often made hers with a ham bone, but to this is easily kept vegetarian by keeping the bone out.

Then there is the issue of exactly how to prepare your beets.  Pre-cooked versus raw in the soup? Chopped, grated, shredded, or sliced? I've settled on roasting, then peeling my beets. And I am firmly in the camp of slicing my beets into matchsticks. It provides a bit of toothiness to the soup, but not as much as you would get if you diced the beets. Yes, it takes longer, but it is a perfect Sunday morning activity with a three year old and a butter knife by your side.

Borscht (Just like my Baba's, minus the peas)

(8-10 cups)

3 pounds beets (6-8 medium)

1 medium onion

2 celery ribs

1 tbsp vegetable oil

4 medium carrots

8 cloves garlic, minced.

19 ounce can diced tomatoes

6 cups water/stock

ham bone (optional)

leaves from one bunch celery

1 tbsp chopped fresh dill

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.  Trim ends from beets, toss with a little bit of vegetable oil, salt, and pepper.  Roast in oven for 1 and 1/2 hours. Let cool completely.

2. Peel the beets. Julienne into 1/8 inch sticks, about 1-1.5 inches long. Do the same to the carrots. Set aside.

3. Finely dice the onion and celery ribs.  Saute with vegetable oil until soft.  Add in garlic and saute an additional 30 seconds. Stir in beets, carrots, tomatoes and their juice, and 6 cups water.  If using the ham bone add it now. Let simmer over low heat for about 2 hours, covered.

4. Turn off the heat, stir in the celery leaves and dill. Season well with salt and pepper. You can serve it immediately, but borscht benefits from sitting a day or two.

5.  To serve, garnish with a dollop of sour cream or creme fraiche.  Alternatively, drizzle with some heavy cream.

Pyrohy Addendum

Lest I gave the impression that pyrohy are only for the days when your belly needs something solid to weigh you down, I thought I should share this photo.  This is my mom making pyrohy in Mexico, on Christmas Eve last year.  My pregnant sister insisted that it wasn't Christmas Eve without pyrohy so my mom, despite her desire to read on the beach, indulged her and made a batch.  Notice the empty wine bottle for rolling the dough!

The Ultimate Comfort Food

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm a good Ukrainian girl.  If you are from anywhere but Western Canada this elicits a questioning, "So?"  But out here that takes pride to admit. Ukrainians are the butt of many a joke about stupidity, frugality, and general country bumpkiness.  Not to mention the ability to consume alcohol and vast quantities of starchy food. My drinking and eating habits aside, I am proud to say that I thinks I gots me some good book learnin', I certainly know how to spend money, and my farm experiences revolve around being shipped to rural Saskatchewan for a few weeks every summer only or investigating potential greenhouse gas reduction projects in my professional life.

As a Ukrainian I can proudly say that I know how to make borscht, blood sausage, cabbage rolls (holubsti) and pyrohy.  Okay, maybe I'm not proud of making blood sausage  - that stuff is vile! But oh, those pyrohy, or pierogies, to the rest of you.

Pyrohy are a go to food in this house.  No energy to cook? Throw some pyrohy in boiling water and dinner is served.  Meeting the potential (at the time) grandson-in-law? Keep water on a low boil until the moment he walks in the door and cook him pyrohy. Shitty, cold day?  Fill up on pyrohy. Pregnant?  Eat them every day your husband, a.k.a. the Diet Nazi, allows.

Although Hubby is only Ukrainian by marriage, he knows the love you get from a heaped plate filled with dumplings, fried onions, and a ridiculously large scoop of sour cream.  When his father was struggling with cancer years back we took a break from the hospital and joined my family at the church pyrohy supper. Concerned family friends asked us how we and his family were managing.  Between bites he simply replied, "Fuck cancer, I'm going to die of a heart attack!" And then he went back for seconds.

It isn't just the tender dough wrapped around creamy, salty potatoes (usually) that fills your gut with a heavy hug, it is the process of making pyrohy. They are time consuming to make. Repetitive and rather boring, it can be meditative. Or you can invite a whole bunch of friends or family over, chat, sip tea (or rye) to stir, roll, and pinch. Trays of frozen dumplings and a lot of laughs later you may not even need to eat them. Okay, you will need to eat them, but maybe a few less.

If you don't have the time or some interested friends, find a Ukrainian church with a pyrohy supper or a European deli that sells homemade. Do. Not. Ever. Buy a supermarket offering. No matter how much bacon, fried onions, or sour cream you slather on, they will not be good. The dough will be tough and the filling gluey.

This is my mom's recipe for pyrohy dough. Find any church cookbook and you will see a million different ways to make the dough. This one, in my handwritten recipe book, makes no sense on paper. No, you are not making glue. Actually, it is damn confusing when you make it too.  Trust me, like the pyrohy process as a whole, take it gentle and it will all come together into your little pillows of goodness.  

Yesterday I invited Julie over and we made a couple of batches between dog adventures, baby snacks, and interviews. She couldn't stop gushing (at least it seemed that way to me) about the tender dough and got me thinking about all sorts of filling options and even frying them before boiling. Bad, Julie!

Baba's Pyrohy Dough

5 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup canola or vegetable oil

1 egg, room temperature

2 cups recently boiled water

1.  In a large bowl mix together the flour and salt.

2. Combine the oil and the egg, beat together lightly.  Stir in to the flour and salt.  It will not combine well, but keep stirring and working at it until you have a coarse meal, like biscuit dough would be before you added the liquid.

3.  Pour your hot water in to the flour and egg mixture, all at once.  Immediately start stirring. It won't look like it is coming together, but keep stirring it.  Don't beat the crap out of it, but stir for a minute or two and it will come together into a somewhat lumpy, ugly dough. The next three photos show this.  Cover with a damp tea towel or loosely cover with plastic wrap.  Let it rest for at least 15 minutes, if not 30.

While your dough is resting you can get your fillings together.  Purists will insist upon mashed potatoes, perhaps with some cottage cheese or maybe cheddar.  Some of us love a good sauerkraut filling (the only ones I would eat as a kid).  The classic filling in this house is cheesy mashed potatoes with a crumble of bacon smack in the middle.  Don't mix it in with the potatoes because the sharp bits of bacon will pierce the dough.  Regardless of your filling choice, make sure it is cool or cold, not hot.  Julie brought over two very yummy fillings - mashed potatoes with cheese and carmelized onions and mashed potatoes with leftover chicken and gravy.

You can also make dessert pyrohy.  My sister-in-law loves them simply filled with saskatoon berries.  Recently I made some with blueberries and ricotta.  And yesterday I used the pear left from Smilosaurus' snack, carmelized them with a bit of butter and a sprinkling of brown sugar mixed with ricotta.  Julie's suggestion was mascarpone, but I had none.  The dessert pyrohy is best served browned in butter with a bit of sugar, like a good blintz should be.  And perhaps some lightly sweetened sour cream on the side.

Let's get to the process of filling that dough now.

First I cut a good hunk from the resting dough, recovering the remainder.  Then roll it out into a log, like we do with playdough.  Make it about an inch around.  Then cut off 1/2 inch chunks. Take those chunks and roll them into balls.  You will have about 1 inch balls.  Of course you can make them any size you want, this is just how I do it.

The next thing you want to do is to roll those balls flat with a rolling pin.  Not too flat or your dumpling won't stay together.  Not too thick or you will have very thick pyrohy and the dough may not cook all the way through.  I would say it's about 1/8 to 3/16 of an inch.

Take a heaping teaspoonful of your filling and place it in the middle of your dough.  Again, not too much, not too little.  After you've made a few you will be able to eyeball the perfect ratio for you.  
Fold over one side to create a semi-circle.  I do this all in my hand, but Julie favoured doing it right on the counter - or with her fancy contraption that made them all too perfect for my liking.

Finally, pinch the sides together.  This is where personal style takes over.  My mom, for example, does a solid pinch all the way around, once.  I do a soft pinch for an initial seal, then a firmer crimp.  It doesn't matter how as long as it is sealed and preferably without a big flange of thin dough.
Et voila!  (I don't know how to say that in Ukrainian).

Unless you live in a large family, or an average Ukrainian family, one batch of dough makes more than one meal or two.  The best way to store pyrohy is frozen.  You need to freeze them individually first.  I lay out tea towels, sprinkle them generously with flour, and place the pyrohy on them as I finish each one.  Freeze, then store in plastic bags, containers, or even ice cream pails in the freezer until ready to use.  Just remember to label them if you made more than one kind! 
Last but not least, you need to cook your pyrohy.  Whether you cook them fresh or frozen., the technique is the same.  Bring a large pot of water to a full boil.  Toss in your pyrohy, not crowding them too much.  Keep at a boil and stir gently every now and then.  The pyrohy are finished when they float at the top.  If they are frozen and particularly thick you might poke them gently to make sure the filling is soft.  Drain.

You can eat them straight this way, generally served with fried onions and sour cream.  A lot of people fry them with the onions to crisp up the outsides.  Growing up we ate them boiled for dinner and the leftovers were fried for breakfast the next day.  What else do you do without a microwave?

I serve mine with some garlic sausage/keilbasa/kubasa.  Other traditional sides/toppings include mushroom gravy, dill sauce, and bacon.  If you want to make the pretense of a healthy meal you might serve salad or peas - to the kids -  with this.  Oh yeah, bring on the heart attack.

Hard Day on the Job

It takes a lot of energy to build all day, especially if you are only 5. My nephew came down for the weekend with my folks to build a playhouse for the girls. He was set with his real and play tools, his own tool belt, and the right attitude to be a supervisor. That meant he stood around a lot, complained about working, and took many breaks to eat. Okay, he did climb on teh roof and help install the shingles. But it seemed like everytime I went outside to check on progress he was eating. Of course, with Baba (my mom) around, no one went hungry. We are Ukrainian, after all.

It was hard work building that playhouse. In true Ukrainian fashion my mom fixed up an impromptu lunch of some Sylvan Star Gouda, Stawnichy's kubasa, homemade dill pickles, and some bread from a filipino bakery in Edmonton.

At the end of the day I teased my dad that although this was for my girls, that it really was a dream come true for me - 25 years late. I grew up in the days where you were sent out to play with instructions to come back when it was dark. My friends and I would go to the park behind our elementary school where there were woods and a small clearing. We called it Smurf Village. It was our fantasy to have my dad build a playhouse in the clearing. We could then go out there every day and have lunch and commune with the Smurfs. Truly, I would have settled for a playhouse in my backyard. Now I have it. And my dad made it a bit taller than the plans so I will fit in there nicely. Hmm, maybe I will put a comfy chair in there for me instead of a little table and toys for the girls...

All it needs is a coat of paint - once the rain stops and the Monster goes to daycare this week. But the Monster was happy to peek out the windows and open the door to scare whoever she made stay inside. We even brought out some tea supplies so we can have our first official picnic.

The playhouse was christened last night. What a better way to wrap up the busy day with a campfire in the backyard and s'mores. The porch was a perfect venue to sneak marshmallows straight from the bag and snuggle up to Dido for chocolate. Our nephew, not surprisingly, was happy to fill up on Taber cob and s'mores. But hey, he had a busy day supervising, er, I mean, pounding nails.

Sources:
Stawnichy's Meat Processing
Sylvan Star Cheese