Perogie Party!! {a GUEST POST from @deanguest}

Today I am honoured to present my first guest blogger on the site.  Dean and I have been corresponding on Twitter (follow him @deanguest) for some time now, and he decided to follow my Gramma's recipe to make a perogie feast! Having made 65 of these bad boys myself, I can only imagine what it was like to pump out 150! I'm surprised he lived through it to tell the tale! AMAZING!  I asked him if he could document the preparation and write up a blog post to go along with it, and so without further ado, I present to you: Perogie Party! - courtesy of Dean Guest.  Enjoy! (Leave a comment and let him know what you think! or add him to Twitter and let him know yourself)

the man himself: @deanguest

After reading the great story on Baked in Vancouver about Perogies, I decided that it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and attempt to make perogies myself.  So one weekend, I decided to clear my schedule and planned for 6 hours to make a feast of perogies for a group of my friends.
I bought all the beer, polish sausage, sauerkraut, rolling pin, cookie cutter and the rest of the ingredients, the night before and read the recipe over a dozen times.  I started to feel a real anxiety starting to kick in, but thankfully I popped a couple of beers to ease my nerves.

The next morning, I sat in the kitchen at noon and laid everything out on the counter to make sure I was ready.
I decided to make two different types of fillings to attempt to accommodate all meat loving and vegetarian friends.  

The fillings I decided to make are listed below:

1) Cheese/Potato/Sauerkraut
2) Veal/Pork/Jalapeno/Garlic/Potato/Sauerkraut/Cheese

I made Filling Option #2 quite spicy and it kind of reminded me of a Mexican style filling
For the pastry, I followed the instructions in Grannies recipe to the letter, except I used 15 cups of flour and multiplied all other ingredients by a factor of 5.

 First I peeled the potatoes to boil and then started the process to cook the meat.

I chopped jalapenos.
I chopped the garlic.

I let the dough "rest" for about 1 hour, while I completed the fillings.
Then I rolled out the dough.  Now this was tough to get a decent thickness and to prevent the dough from sticking to the granite I used a lot of flour underneath and rolled the dough back and sprinkled flour.

Then I cut the dough using the cookie cutter and added the filling and pinched off each little perogie with love and affection. Christ this took about 2 hours to make about 150 perogies.

After all the perogies were made, 5 hours later, I started to boil 3 pots of water.

I also prepare onions to fry and caramelize on the stove for toppings on the perogies.  I also sliced mushrooms and diced the polish sausage and fried both of them together as well.
I could feel my arteries hardening...
My friends started to arrive at 5:30 and i offered them all beers and sat them round the counter, while I was boiling the perogies.
As each batch of perogies were cooked, I put them in a tupperware container with a small amount of margarine to coat them, and then placed them in another covered bowl in the warming oven.
Finally, I served all the perogies with the sides and fed 10 friends a feast of perogies.
Here is a sample of one of the plates...

OMG this was the most intensive cooking experience I have ever attempted.

** I want to thank Dean for taking the time to prepare the perogies, and this post, and for including such yummy looking photographs (the jalapeno picture is my fav!).  I hope you're friends enjoyed eating them, as much as you enjoyed the beer it took to prepare them ;) **