Every September I get a new calendar. It's one of those planning type calendars where I can write everything we need to do in life & that sort of thing. However I'm not very good at the calendar. I start off strong, but usually lose momentum by December and it becomes more of a place to hold various bits of paper. Last year a few of our friends came over and helped me with the process of making pierogies. We had a great time, and with 4 of us, it was roughly a two day process. There was the minor setback of my neighbor having a heart attack in the middle of the street mid way through one of the days & Ben and I had to go do CPR. (He is alive and well today and would not have made it were it not for Ben). However that aside, it was fun, social and we got the job done.
Making pierogies is the Polish equivalent of making tamales. It's not hard, but it is labor-intensive, it's a production line, but it can be fun if you've got friends around you as it is a very social experience. So one of my friends who came to help me last year was happy to join in again this year to help. So we busted out our brand-new calendars and looked at dates. We decided it would be nice to try and get it done early this year so that there was no feeling like we had to rush. So we marked off November 3 as a possible date to do them. As it got closer to the date it seemed almost ridiculous to be doing them so early but at the same time kind of exciting to think we could get some done.
The week before we went trick-or-treating and mentioned to some friends what we what we were doing this weekend. They expressed interest in coming over so we happily opened up the invitation to them as well.
Saturday mornings for me from October through early December involve spending a good portion of my day at the ballet studio. I'm sort of the unofficial, backstage, behind-the-scenes candid photographer for our studio's production of the Nutcracker. I also help out here and there in whatever capacity needs helping, moving costumes around helping girls in and out of them, writing the names on costumes - whatever needs to be done, I do. Knowing that I'd be spending from 9:30 until about 2:00 ballet studio, I made the potatoes for our pierogies on Friday night. Figuring that it was primarily going to be me, my one girlfriend, possibly her husband & Ben and maybe the friends that expressed an interest in coming over, I didn't make two batches of potatoes. I know how things come up and I didn't want to bank on having a full crew of people and then have tons of food that I wasn't prepared to make all by myself.
One batch potatoes is a total of 10 pounds of potatoes and 2 pounds of sharp cheddar cheese. It works better to have the potatoes made ahead of time so they have a chance to cool. When I got home from ballet, I was able to get the house picked up a bit, pulled out the potatoes that were already made, clear off the table, make some cheese platters and set up a couple of snacks and food stations, and generally get things ready for when my friends were to show up around three 3:30. My friend's husband decided to join in the fun this year, so that meant at the start we had four adults plus a few kids working at making the pierogies. In my experience kids are happy to help but only for about 10-15 minutes, it's repetitive work and really not all that fun when you're a kid.
We seemed to be a well oiled machine & quite efficient so much so that that first batch of 10 pounds of potatoes was nearly gone by 5:30 when part 2 of the crew arrived. So we sent someone off the store to get another 10 pounds of potatoes and set to work at making batch number two. The second batch of potatoes we always add in some sort of a chile. In the past I've used the New Mexico Hatch chilies, or when I haven't been able to get them from family I'll use just your basic canned, diced chiles from the grocery store. This year a friend of mine recently gave me six or so jalapeños from her garden. I decided to roast them on the stove, my mother-in-law peeled the skin and chopped them and we added them into the potatoes. (That Gampy was hand mashing)! You could tell just from the smell after they were roasted that they were good and hot, just the way we like. Making the potatoes into potato balls or even just sorting them out so that you can easily put them on the rolled out pasta is not very easy when the potatoes are piping hot. We did our best to separate the potatoes and a few bowls, put them in the refrigerator and generally cool them down. In the meantime I got more pasta dough made and rolled out and we finished up the last of the plain cheese pierogies.
A 10 pound batch of potatoes will yield anywhere from 250 - 300 pierogies. And that's about how many we got. Waiting for the potatoes to cool down a bit was a great time to refill drinks have a snack, have a sandwich, feed the kids, notice that we had kids around and that sort of thing. Once the potatoes were cool enough we got going again and cranked out the next 250 to 300 pierogies.
When all was said and done, from start to finish, not including total cleanup, we made pierogies from 3:30 until about 10:30, and in that time we reckon we made somewhere around 600 pierogies. Part of the deal when you come help me make pierogies is that you get to take some home with you. I leave the choice with you as to whether you would like for me make them to completion, which includes smothering them in a ridiculous amount of butter and onions or if you'd like to take home a couple of bags of frozen pierogies that you can then do on your own.
What it came down to was a really great evening, with good company, lots of great conversation, and lots of hard work done in a way that didn't seem so hard. This is really what the holidays are about for me. Spending time with friends, spending time with family, making memories, and just having a good time enjoying one another.
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