Book Review: These recipes are Good and Cheap

Think of them as Polish ravioli.

Pierogies are cloud soft pieces of dough wrapped around some mashed potatoes and cheese with a few spices. Easy to make and even easier to eat.
An acquaintance  introduced us to these little treats a dozen years ago. I thought they were ravioli but they were garnished with a glob of sour cream. Really odd, I thought. But once I tasted them, they ended up on my table at least once a week.
Almost always we ate the little treats from a box found in the freezer section at the grocery. These little guys were great, straight from the freezer into the frying pan. Delicious and so easy to make that I never bothered to learn how to make them on my own.

Mistake.

The homemade version is so much better and so easy to make that there is really no excuse for taking the pre-packaged route.

The origins of perogi are unclear, though they are definitely Slavic of some sort. The word "peri" in Slavic languages means "festival" and these things are a great reason to party.

Pierogies 

1 16 ounce container of sour cream
3 cups of flour
2 cups of cold mashed potatoes, seasoned with some chives
1/2 cup of butter
2 onions, chopped

• Put the sour cream in a bowl, mix in the flour to make a dough. Roll the dough out on a floured surface, and cut rounds  using a cookie cutter or a glass. Re-roll the unused dough to make more rounds, up to 4 times (after that, it gets hard to roll out any more.)
• Put about a teaspoon of mashed potatoes in the center of each round, fold over into a half-moon shape, and press and seal the edges with your fingers or a fork. Once you fill them, put the rounds under a towel so they don't dry out.
• Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat, and cook and stir the onions until they're soft. Take the onions out of the pan and put them aside. Leave the butter in the skillet.
• Bring a large saucepan of water to a boil, and carefully drop a few filled pierogies at a time into the boiling water. After they float to the surface, boil for about 4 more minutes.
• Re-heat the butter in the skillet over medium heat. Take the pierogies out of the water (Be careful - they break easily) and plop them into the skillet.
• Brown the bottoms. Flip and brown the other side.
• Put the fried pierogies on a buttered baking sheet as they are done and keep them warm in the oven.
• Sprinkle them with the cooked onions and serve.

Vegetarian.