Pierogies, anyone?

On Friday, I got an email from Dave asking me if he thought it would be fun to let the kids make pierogies on Saturday. You know, let even Max get into it, rolling the dough out, filling them, boiling them. Yeah, sure. Sounds like fun. The last time we made pierogies was before we were married, and we were in our tiny kitchen in our condo and it took hours and hours. Sounds like fun! But, I had to go to the meeting on Saturday morning, and by the time I got back home, the kitchen already looked like this:


I honestly have no idea why the kids have bears belted to them. But whatever. They looked like this from the front:


The dough was all ready to go, it just needed to rise a little. Let's have at it! It was cold, rainy and a good day to be inside. Let's make pierogies!

Even Max helped, dumping the sour cream in the dough.


Soon after this, we dropped the bears.

All the kids rolled out the dough, improvising for rolling pins when necessary...

When in doubt, use a wine bottle!

Don't worry. Once we got to this part, we didn't use Max's dough anymore! It was quite flung about.

We improvised on the cookie cutters, too. Mixed drink, anyone? (Who knew our liquor accessories would be so handy?)

Dave, showing Abby how to fill them and fold them and seal them. To which Abby exclaimed "It's just like an uncrustable!" Yup, it really is.

"Now Nolan, you have to get them pressed tightly."

And Max just continued to fling his on the floor.

Such concentration!

We should do this more often!

Boiling to perfection.

Messy kitchen, three happy campers, and Max in bed!

And then there was one... Dave finished the rest

While the kids watched a movie.

The finished product. Just fry them in some butter, and YUM! We had 72 pierogies. That's a lot of pierogi!

When Max woke up, he thought he was pretty cool.

And I had to give Dave credit. The day was really fun, the pierogies were really good, and everyone had a great time. What you can't see in these pictures is the Christmas music we played in the background the whole time. A little Johnny Mathis to get you in the pierogi making mood! It might be a tad early, but with the weather and the cooking, I couldn't resist. We decided that this should be a tradition every year. I mean, who needs Christmas cookies? When we started talking about making it a tradition I just looked at Dave and said "Ya know, before we know it, they'll be able to do this by themselves, and then we'll blink again and it'll just be me and him, making pierogies together." He looked at me like I'm crazy. And I am, but whatever.

And one final picture of us venturing outside today. I really don't know if they were bundled enough it was so cold. We lasted about 15 minutes, and then decided to have a Wii tournament instead. Ahhh, the heat!

Hope everyone else had a great weekend, too!