Pierogi Night

Between me and John, I’m the primary cook, and he’s the primary cleaner. This works well for us, and I have no real complaints about the way it works out. But I’ve been pretty stressed out this past week. Our younger cat Plum is unwell, and I’ve been busy stuffing pills down her throat and shuttling her to and from the vet’s for a couple of weeks. I really didn’t feel like cooking last night, and as a result, we didn’t actually eat, which is just about my least favorite thing ever. John offered to cook dinner tonight, to let me relax a little. This is how it works when John offers to cook: he tells me he’ll cook, starts coming up with dinner ideas, and I start getting excited about food. Within 15 minutes, I’ve taken over in the kitchen, not content to be the passive eater. I do love it when John cooks, I’m just not very good at being cooked for. I need to get my hands dirty before I eat.

So tonight John offered to make cabbage and potatoes, good hearty fare that uses up the spare bits we have in the fridge (as an added bonus, the potatoes were from somewhere or other in Michigan, and the cabbage was from MSU’s own student organic farm). This immediately made me think of pierogi (not to be confused with John’s favorite, Russian piroshki), and while he was cutting vegetables, I decided to look up a dough recipe, and joined him in the kitchen. He ended up making a filling with mashed potatoes, shredded cabbage, onions, dill, garlic, and a little bit of swiss cheese. At the same time, I made up the dough, and then we got an assembly line going, me spooning filling into the rounds of dough, John forming them into more respectable-looking dumplings. We thought we’d end up freezing half of them, but we just cooked them all so that we can bring them into lunch tomorrow for leftovers

We never get a chance to cook together, because our kitchen is so small, but I really love it. When I come home, the two things I want to do are cook dinner and spend some time hanging out with John, and it’s nice to know the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

How were the pierogi, then? Fucking amazing. No kidding. We keep the frozen junk around as too-drunk-to-cook-anything-more-complicated food, but now that we’re really not drinking to speak of, this is a new dumpling altogether.

Yet another example of cheap delicious slow food bringing people together.