Pierogi Palace

That's what I wanted to call a little take out business, strictly pierogis.  There are so many fillings and I wanted each week to have a specialty in addition to the basics.  My father in law loved poppy seed and Bobalki is still one of my all time favorite desserts.  His mother from Czechoslovakia made pierogi with poppy filling, dried mushrooms, cabbage, cabbage with potato, sauerkraut.  There are many small cookbooks on these little pillows and unending ways to fill them.  These recipes are the ones used by our church for sales, my Dad's version for home, and my mom's family recipe.  I only make the cheese filling and I am so disappointed that the brand of dry cottage cheese locally is like gravel.  It's not the very fine curd that I was used to and these chunks of gravel were tearing the dough.  Next time I will add then to the food processor for a few seconds to break them up.  I have typed the recipes out since some of you were interested, and saved as a .jpg so you should be able to click and print the page.  Also will add to the recipe blog.  The real trick is the pinch, and since it's hard to not get the filling on the edges which will prevent that, as you pinch you kind of pull on the dough a little up from the very edge so it comes over the edge and seals well.  Hard to explain but you can easily get the hang of it, or just run your water dipped finger over the edge before pinching.