Monday, October 26, 2009

Adventures in Cooking, or... Potatoes Potatoes all around the room

Sleepless nights always get me into trouble. I always end up either concocting some grand ambition or a hopeless fantasy to try to lull myself into sleep. Last night it was the former of the two. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., wide-eyed and frustrated, I became fixated on idea of becoming a better cook. Probably because it was 2:30 a.m., my idea quickly went from practical and responsible to ambitiously unrealistic. I- the horrible and mistake-prone cook-  decided to take on making pierogies from scratch. (wikipedia tells me the plural is pierogi? But that sounds weird to me. So I decline.)

So, today was pierogi day! In retrospect, also known as an utterly exhausting day! After class I made a trip to Target and the grocery store-- still very excited-- to gather all my supplies.

The first challenge was making the dough. The recipe told me to knead it until most of the stickiness was gone, but not to overdo it. How exactly do you know when most of the stickiness is gone? I basically punched at it like a cat for a long time. Then I'd think -- this is probably done? Then I'd think... but wait! Maybe there is more stickiness to tackle? The end result was what I'm pretty sure the recipe meant by "don't overdo it." But, it was in dough form! So I claimed it as a victory. Check!

Next step: Make a mashed potatoes type substance for the insides while the dough is chilling. Easy, right? Peel & cut the potatoes, simmer some onions, throw some cheese in there, mix it all up with a mixer... creamy, delightful potatoes will ensue. True. Except when you forget the whole boil the potatoes step. As it turns out when you put a mixer to hard potatoes, all you get is potato bits flying like food casualties around the room.

Potatoes, potatoes everywhere.
Potatoes on the walls, potatoes in my hair.




It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that I might have done something not quite right. A gchat question later to the helpful Miss JK resulted in me learning the secret ingredient to making mashed potatoes-- boiling them first! (And by secret, I mean cleverly hidden in the recipe.) About an hour later after redoing all of the previous steps, however, victory on step 2! Cheesy potatoes! Check!









I did make up for the idiocy of step 2 with some genius, however. Because I didn't have a rolling pin, I decided to use my bottle of wine. Which basically meant I got to drink the rest of the contents before this next step-- yay!




So.... still cooking. This was beginning to take forever. I switched from Joni Mitchell to Kanye West's "Stronger." Then I rolled out the dough with my wine bottle (now mourning the fact that my wine was gone and there was still a ton left to do). I was supposed to cut little circles out and fill them with cheesy potatoes, then close 'em up, boil them, and sautee them with onions. It turns out you can do about 4 at a time with the pans/pots I have, and most of the little fellows didn't seem to make it through the end of the journey. While some of them came out, others tragically lost their potato insides in the water. It was kind of sad. I had sort of bonded with them by this point.





Anyway, 4 hours = about 7 pierogies. I'm hungry because I couldn't stand to eat them all in one sitting. Not after all that. Though they ended up pretty tasty after all.

In the end, I learned a valuable lesson- sometimes there's a reason people never make these things from scratch.


Friday, October 2, 2009

Law school .... and zoology

I'm having trouble giving up my critter fascination after all. Here is another parking lot friend. I think he sort of looks like Fred Thompson, actually. Yeah?