Green chili & cheddar pierogi
This Polish girl grew up in the Southwest.
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Though I am half Polish, I didn’t really grow up eating a lot of Polish food. We mostly ate seasonally and locally, with a lot of Mediterranean, East Asian, and Mexican flavors. We’d occasionally make fruit pierogi with my grandma, and we had gołąbki (stuffed cabbage) a few times, but I really don’t have a lot of memories eating Polish food.
As an adult, it’s still not a regular part of my diet, but it’s been something I’ve been craving more and more. I’ve grown to love fermented foods like sauerkraut and living in Brooklyn means I have pretty easy access to Polish restaurants and markets, so I probably have it a handful of times a year.
At a recent gathering, I was expecting a little bit of Polish food from the Eastern European host, so I was pretty let down by a full spread of Italian cooking. The food was good, but I wanted potato dumplings, ya know?
I called up my dad to talk about Polish cooking and he told me that we didn’t eat a lot of Polish food simply because it wasn’t really popular in our house. I asked him for a family pierogi recipe, and after calling one of his cousins and coming up empty handed, his advice to me was, “look online.”
I scoured pierogi recipes online and read through a lot of posts on the Babas Ukrainian Kitchen Facebook group (the Polish one hasn’t accepted me yet LOL), and there are a lot of opinions on how to make pierogi. Of everything I read, the only through-line was flour and salt. Whether or not you put butter, sour cream, or potato water into the pierogi dough was up for (a heated) debate. Most recipes called for an egg, so I went that route. I had a lot of extra sour cream and I used that alongside a little butter for tenderness and structure.
The green chili & cheddar route is completely non-traditional, and according to my dad:
It’s a sarcastic and playful thing he always says when he’s suggested something extremely left field like green chili & cheddar pierogi. But when I am making up my own family traditions, it’s sometimes necessary to go a little rogue.
I hope you’ll join me — and these pierogi — in hell.
