Larry as far as the dough, Yes I have a recipe. I spent a year in 1991 on an educational exchange in Krasnodar Russia. I have Mrs. Lazko's dough recipe.
Mrs. Lazko was the grandmother of the three generation family I lived with, in heroes of the great war apartments, on red street, I kid you not. She enjoyed cooking traditional Russian food for me.
Berated me constantly (much of which, because I understood more than I spoke she didn't think I understood), and constantly told me about how many days I would have lasted in the Great Patriotic War (WWII), usually about three to four, depending on her mood. She often mentioned when prepping food how she cooked differently, in the war, with shoe polish as shortening, and ground newspapers as flour. I often asked questions, and was rebuffed and told I was fat and lazy.
The woman could make decent food from anything, though, no spices, a crappy apartment stove (heck mine was better when I lived in Norristown, PA),
And darn could she make perogies.
Weird starter yeast thing going with saving a bit from the last one.
When I was leaving, I asked her for her dough recipe for perogies. And she of course told me in Russian K chourtu, 'go to the devil' could be interpreted as a Russian 'F&ck yourself'.
My last day, she gave me an envelope with her recipe. Kissed me on both cheeks twice. Cried a bit. Lessons learned, Russians are insane. But rather good to be around, both for stories, and recipes.
I have the original recipe, but it is in a box that went from the Oklahoma move direct to a storage locker. Let me think about the differences between that and my current recipe. (less lard, by 93%) and we are moving so gonna get back the cookboks and notebooks I sent to storage.
Cheers,
TBS
The online recipe I found worked up pretty good for it being the first time I tried making them. It was very tender and worked great with the filling (potato and grated cheddar cheese), but I rolled the dough too thin on a couple, and a few others I stuffed a little too much and stretched the dough too far. Those were both operator error, so they shouldn't reflect on the recipe.
