Food - Pierogi and the Daring Kitchen

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

A couple of months ago I joined "The Daring Kitchen" and then went on the diet and drove into the Sunrise to Mount Gambier for months on end and deferred starting until things calmed down a bit.
Greg and I have dubbed Saturday "Anything goes" as far as food is concerned so this seemed the ideal time to throw myself into a Kitchen Challenge. The August Cooks Challenge is Pierogi
what better I thought for my low carb diet than dumplings stuffed with potato and other stuff.
So I thought I would halve the recipe and so I mixed
1 and 1/4 cups of wholemeal flour with half a beaten egg and 1/2 cup of water and a pinch of salt


Then I had to let that sit for at least 20 minutes it was more like half an hour. While it was sitting I cut enough potato for what was supposed to be 3/4 cup of potato and cooked that. I bought a bunch of fresh dill this morning at the Farmers Market in Mount Barker and so I chopped up a couple of tablespoons of that, a small onion finely diced, some fresh cream and butter and mixed that into the cooked potato and mashed it all together.
Then I let it get completely cold (Very important)


After the dough had sat I rolled it out to about 3 mm thick. This is a soft dough and still quite sticky so I needed too have plenty of flour on the mat while rolling it out. I cut it into 10 cm circles, I wet the edges and put a teaspoon of the potato in the center and folded it over and pressed the edges with a fork.

Then I put on a pot of water on let it boil and put the dumplings in. After they floated I let them boil for a few minutes and then pulled them out and drained them. Then I put some lemon infused olive oil and butter in a pan and fried them until they were crispy and golden brown

I drained them on some paper towel while the salmon and the beans I added for a token gesture towards healthy eating.

Topped with some natural yogurt mixed with a bit more dill and lemon juice. Greg gave it a big thumbs up. He doesn't like potato so that was good. Half the recipe gave me 15 large dumplings. We ate most of them and I froze 5 so we can see how they freeze. Everybody else who has made them says they freeze beautifully.