Charlie D's Ukrainian Recipes

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I wish I could get my husband to eat beets, especially borscht. He's 100% Ukranian. Both his parents emigrated here from the Ukraine way back when.

While he does enjoy cheese pierogies, he'd rather eat worms & die than eat anything containing beets.
 
BreezyCooking said:
I wish I could get my husband to eat beets, especially borscht. He's 100% Ukranian. Both his parents emigrated here from the Ukraine way back when.

While he does enjoy cheese pierogies, he'd rather eat worms & die than eat anything containing beets.

LOL, Breezy - I'm 50% Cajun and hate okra.
 
Charlie D, I didn't see the recipe for the pastry pirozhki - would love to compare it those I remember as a child. Would you please share?
 
Pastry pirozhki are very simple. I just buy pastry dough. For filling you can do what ever your immagination allows you. Cut the square, put filling in the middle fold into tringle. Bake in the oven for 20 or so minutes.
 
CharlieD said:
Pastry pirozhki are very simple. I just buy pastry dough. For filling you can do what ever your immagination allows you. Cut the square, put filling in the middle fold into tringle. Bake in the oven for 20 or so minutes.

What kind of pastry dough do you use? I really enjoyed pirozhki too, but I have to say the source of the product I had wasn't anything remotely russian or ukranian or any of the related area, so their authenticity was much in doubt. They were more like a savoury fried filled donuts. (Thus, as you can see, something obviously very different!) So I am very curious of the real pirozhki...
 
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charlie, i was surprised to see that you bake your pirozhki/pierogi.

my mil always fried them, in lots of butter, with sweated onions.

they were traditionally served with sour cream, apple sauce, and either cold or hot red cabbage slaw.

my wife would love the idea of baked pirozhki, being the health nut she is, always on the lookout for fat/calorie reducing methods of cooking.

how do you serve yours?
 
Thanks for a great thread. Charlie, I assume the Tomatoes are whole? The pickling seems a straight forward fermentation. Does one eat them as a side to other dishes or how are they used on Ukrainain tables?

I think 5 gal. may be a bit much for my first try but, I have to try this. Thanks again.
 
Pirozhki come in many varieties. There are deep fried ones, fried ones, baked bread type dough, baked pastry type dough. The baked ones I described above I make using Pepperidge Farm pastry dough. It comes frozen in the package here, it is the same type of dough as used for Napoleon (in case you need to find something similar)

The deep fried pirozhki I make are somewhat time-consuming. I use home made dough. It is yeast dough, so it takes time to rise.

I've never had pirozhki served with sour cream. Are you sure you are not talking about pirogy, Buckytom?

Robt, yes the tomatoes are whole and usually served as a side for meat dish. Instead of steak sauce or ketchup, or even instead of salad, but you just eat it with the entree. And yes, you can scale it down and make one gallon.
 
MIL learned to make what she called halupke (Like most of you, I'm spelling phonetically -- countries, cultures, and even alphabets are so different that you can't keep track) from her Ruthenian mother. Good Grief! Hubby says the zhinkrove (pieroge) he used to eat as a kid was made with a filling of mashed potatoes. We're talking poor people food here, it was a meal for (a) people who couldn't afford meat or (b) lent. It was boiled and then had butter drizzled over it, then toasted bread crumbs. He and his cousins used to call them "sinkers" because they were so heavy!

I've made many versions of cabbage rolls over the years, adopting various turns on it from Polish, Slovene, Slovak, Russian, etc, friends. Pierogi I don't do much.
 
Lol!! "Sinkers" are what our family calls our traditional Czech Bread Dumplings. Actually, since they're nearly always served with sauerkraut, they're more often known as "Sinkers with Grass".
 
...Ukrainian cooking is that spices are very lightly used if at all. Salt and pepper...

You are very much so correct. Not only there were very little of any fancy spices, only if you were lucky enough to go to one of the southern republics or Georgia at least during the summer and there you’d pick up some spices. Otherwise it was salt and black pepper or red pepper (which I have no clue where it came from). As far as herbs go: dill and parsley and parsley root during the summer, maybe few other roots, i.e. horseradish and its leaves. Gosh I can’t think of anything else. Bay leaves. Allspice, cloves. That is it. I can’t remember anything else. People used a lot of leaves, like black currant leaves, sour cherry leaves. Sorel leaves, spinach was not popular at all. A dandelion leaves.

Even such simple things like bell peppers were brought in from Bulgaria or Hungry.

Not having any of the fancy herbs or spices however did not make the food tasty boring or tasteless. Ukrainian foods are really incredible and extremely versatile. For may-many ethnic foods there is something similar in Ukrainian cosine. I.e. won tons – pirogy (vareniki). Italian meatballs in tomato sauce – Ukrainian meatballs in meat sauce. Hamburger – kotlety. I can’t think of anything else right now. You give me a name of food _ I’ll find something similar.
 
Way to go Charlie and everyone who has responded to this thread. This is great! I hope you don't mind a gringo like me chiming in from time to time. If you have the patience for it I could post Olga Bondar's awesome Spartacus cake (tort) - her family recipe named for a striped candy, Sparta, that was a childhood favorite of her's. She sent me some with a book she brought back from a recent trip back "home" to Kiev. I wrote the recipe for a non cook like me, especially a non baker, but I could shorten up a bit for those more experienced. I haven't met anyone who doesn't like it and I've made it about six times and shared widly.
 
charlie, i was surprised to see that you bake your pirozhki/pierogi.

my mil always fried them, in lots of butter, with sweated onions.

they were traditionally served with sour cream, apple sauce, and either cold or hot red cabbage slaw.

my wife would love the idea of baked pirozhki, being the health nut she is, always on the lookout for fat/calorie reducing methods of cooking.

how do you serve yours?

Buckytom, I'm, wondering what would be most traditional - fried or baked. I'm going back to when those old large tile wood fired stoves/ovens were the standard, and are still in use. Would frying or baking be easier I wonder. You know the stoves - the one that the devil hid behind in Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does One Man Need?"

I have a YouTube link to a young lady cooking in her rural village kitchen that has that stove. I'll post the link if anyone would like for me to.
 
While I'm here I might as well post the YouTube link to the village kitchen in Ukraine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH25ZbAB7Rc Hope it works for you. For folks like me who haven't been there and probably now (just got older today :) won't go on Books by Volunteers who serve Ukraine Orphans are a carefully selected group of YouTube links to Ukraine, you might enjoy. Just click on the Ukraine Links tab and at the bottom of the first links page are links to the YouTube collections.
See you in cyber space! D
 
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Charlie D., what a great thread!! I forgot to tell you but my hubby and I made your borscht recipe and it was wonderful. Like you and your DW we had to compromise on the beets to potatos ratio---I like less beets he likes more and vice versa with potatos. I love Ukrainian food---they make the best soups!! :)
 
Yes they sure do. Ukranians really know how to cook. They like to eat and they like to cook. People going to scream at me, but russians don't know how to cook period. Schee, yech, yuk.

I'm glad you liked the borscht. Did you make that special addition? The peppers?
 
Charlie! What are you trying to do - start WWWIII?? With the energy thing in Ukraine, NATO, and all that. You know as well as I do that the Russians claim all the good stuff! Surely they invented something good to eat, but being the younger brother to Ukraine maybe not. :ermm: Oh my! I better go wash my mouth out with soap.
 
That's the thing they do claim a lot. Like for example first airplane, first VCR, well the list is endless. I'm sure they had some good recipes alone the way. But there was a bigger, better, much tastier one in Ukraine. Russians just do not like eating as much as Ukrainians. That is of course doesn't say anything good about Ukrainians, because food is the only thing on their minds.
 
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