July 17, 2010:  As an American descendant of Polish immigrants, one of the ways that my family has kept the traditions of our homeland alive is through food and Holiday traditions.  Ever since I can remember my favorite Holiday has been Christmas Eve.  Not Christmas Day, Christmas EVE.  This is when the celebration really takes place for Polish families in a festival called Wigilia.  Starting at dusk, family and friends gather together and feast on traditional foods, share the opłatek (a type of Communion wafer blessed by the priests at the local Polish parish) open gifts and yes, drink vodka.  The celebration culminates in a midnight Mass or Pasterka, celebrating the birth of the Christ.  My family may not always have made it to the Pasterka but we always managed to eat.  And drink.  A lot.  My favorite thing to eat?  Pierogi!  Handmade, packed full of the goodness of the earth, they are my Slavic soul food!

A few years back my sisters and I took over the tradition of making the pierogi for Wigilia.  It is a multi-step process that takes several days given the quantity that we have to make.  They are a very popular dish!  First, the various fillings are made:  potato and cheese, potato and onion, farmer’s cheese (a Baltic specialty cheese, similar to ricotta and perhaps the most traditional filling) and of course cabbage!  Then several batches of dough have to be mixed up, kneaded, rolled out (the worst part!) and cut into circles.  Each shell then has to be stuffed and sealed.  The stuffed peirogi are boiled and then set aside to be sautéed until golden brown before serving.  This is definitely a labor of love as rolling out that much dough is back breaking.  I am sore for several days afterwards.  No wonder Poles drink so much vodka-to numb the pain of rolling out pierogi dough!  Given the time and effort involved in this culinary delight, I only make pierogi for Christmas Eve.

I was in the supermarket here the other day and got to looking at packages of emapanada shells, empanadas being a very popular dish here.  It suddenly hit me, these little round circles of dough looked like the pierogi shells I labor so instensely over every Christmas.  But they couldn’t be the same thing, could they?  Well, why couldn’t they be?  Dough is dough, more or less.  But to be sure I read the ingredients:  harina, agua, mantequilla, sal.  Flour, water, butter, salt.  My God, they are pierogi shells!  But this can’t be!  Here, in Buenos Aires, in July I was holding pre-made pierogi shells in my hands!  This was too good to be true!  I bought some of the little shells, picked up some potatoes and onions and hurried back to the apt. to try this.

Lo and behold, the empanada shells worked out wonderfully and I had handmade (more or less) potato and onion pierogi!  It was like Christmas in July!

On a side note, if you are looking for butter in BsAs, you’ll be looking for manteca, not mantequilla.  After several years in San Diego where Mexicans cook with manteca, which is ciento por ciento grasa (100% fat, lard) and butter their bread with mantequilla I was hesitant to purchase packages of manteca, thinking it was cooking fat.  I was bewildered that I could not find butter.  Standing in front of the manteca I asked a local where the mantequilla was.  She looked at me pitifully, picked up a package of manteca, put it in my hand and said gently, “Así es.”   That’s when I read the ingredients of the package she had just placed in my hands:  crema de leche, sal.  Que estupida…