43. Make perogies for Matt.

Status: Complete (for eternity)

Before adding this item to my list (because of my insistence on Matt that he needed to try homemade perogies - the real thing - the kind that only Ukrainian baba's (grandma's) can truly master), I forgot how difficult, time-consuming, tedious, and irrepressibly drab and awful making perogies from scratch is.

First of all.....who has the time to pound dough into submission? 18th century Ukrainians, that's who. When there were no mindless sitcoms to be watched or cars to be driven or Facebook to be frequented, Ukrainians in the vast Canadian prairies loved a good knead.

And the tiresome number of steps required! I had to boil the potatoes to mash them, and then, after completed the unforgiving act of filling each circle of dough and sealing each little perogy so incredibly meticulously that they could not be penetrated by neither air nor any force meeker than a nuclear holocaust, I had to boil the damn things again! Can't we save a step here? Cut out the middle man? It's 2008, for Christ's sake!

But in the end, I think Matt enjoyed them. (After I fried them up for him, yet another cooking step in these demanding, ungrateful bites of Ukrainian deliciousness.) I should advise him not to get too attached though, I won't be making these when I'm a trophy wife. I can't afford to ruin my pretty hands pulverizing dough.