Welcome back to my multicultural cooking blog! I decided to continue my passion blog theme for this semester because I really enjoyed learning about my heritage through food. I also feel like cooking has become my new hobby. Over winter break I embarked on making latkes for the first time without my Grandma. For those of you who read my blog last semester you might remember that I have a family tradition of making latkes every holiday season with my Grandma and my cousin. Unfortunately with Covid cases going up it is no longer safe for me to be indoors with my Grandma, even with a mask on; however I still wanted to continue the family tradition of making latkes over winter break so I decided to try it on my own. I must say, I did a pretty good job, but my dog got a hold of 40 of the latkes from the counter and ate every single one! 

To start off this semester I picked up where I left off, which was Russian cuisine. I decided to try to make pelmeni, which are meat filled dumplings that originated in the Siberian regions of Russia, according to the website momsdish where I found the recipe I used. The page described pelmeni as a typical Russian comfort food for snowy days, which was perfect because I cooked them on the day we were all snowed in due to the nor’easter. I was a little intimidated by the fact that I had to make my own dough, and it turns out that I was right about my fears. 

I struggled a lot with this recipe, even though I pretty much followed it exactly. I ended up having about half of the meat filling left but no more dough. The dough also became very hard to work with after the first time it was rolled out because the flour from the surface got incorporated into it, which took away its stretch and made it almost impossible to roll out a second time. Also, I did not have a cookie cutter so I had to improvise and use the top of a can, which I think was too wide. My dumplings were pretty big, bigger than I think they were supposed to be but it was hard for me to tell from the pictures on the website. 

Another issue I had is that the recipe says to take the dumplings out of the boiling water when they float to the top, and I did, but when I cut one open it was still raw on the inside. I ended up leaving all the dumplings in for an additional five minutes, then started removing them. Some dumplings somehow stuck to the bottom and I had to scrape them up which caused some of them to break. I used a blend of ground pork and ground beef for my filling, which had shrunk a pretty good amount when I cut the dumplings open to eat. This meant that the dough seriously overpowered the meat. I think I probably did not roll my dough out enough. 

Overall, I probably would not make pelmeni again. If I do, I will definitely use a different recipe that gives more detailed instructions because there were several moments in the process when my brain went ???. If you want to try to make pelmeni, find a different recipe than the one I used.

Before the pelmeni were cooked.

After the pelmeni were cooked. I put some butter on and ate them with a side of sour cream.