One potato, two potato...a pile of potatoes!

My husband came home the other day with a 10 lb sack of potatoes, amongst various other ingredients that I had not asked him to purchase.  He simply said "do something with it."  That sounded like a episode like "Chopped", where chefs are asked to cook dishes from a random assortment of ingredients, so I brainstormed a bit.

I headed over to my favourite recipe site (all recipes), and searched up "russet potatoes".  Perogies came back as a hit, and since I haven't eaten them for a long time, I decided to go for it.

The recipe is here, if you're interested.

To start off, I scrubbed and peeled 9 potatoes.  The recipe called for 8, but I wasn't sure of size.  I ended up using about 5 lbs, which in hindsight, was way too much.

(Yes, I know they are not perfectly peeled.  I'm lazy, k?)

Next step was to cube the potatoes and boil them.  My method of boiling potatoes is to place them in cold water, high heat until on full boil, cover the pot, and then turn off the heat.  I then let the whole thing sit for about 15 minutes, and the potatoes come out perfectly without me worrying about the pot boiling over. 

While I was waiting for the potatoes to cook, I started working on the dough.  I first assembled the wet ingredients:

And then mixed them together.  Then I assembled the dry ingredients.

Then I mixed everything together.  I'm glad I didn't use my Kitchenaid, as it would have definitely been over-capacity.

(I really don't know why my image is rotated.  Fortunately, dough is dough, regardless how you look at it.)

While I let the dough sit for 15 minutes, the potatoes were ready, and I went ahead smashed them, and added the seasonings, minus the cheese sauce.  Instead, I added some milk and a lot more grated cheese.  Yum.

By then the dough was ready, so I rolled out the dough.  The directions said to split the dough in half, but I split it into 3 balls, which made it easier to handle.  The dough was very soft and easy to handle.  After rolling it out, I used a cup and started to cut out circles.

From on there, it was like making gao zhi, and I had no problems there.

The recipe said it would make 60 perogies, but I ended up with 75.  I froze most of them, and kept about 15 to cook for dinner at night.

To cook, I followed the advice of some reviewers and boiled them until floating, and then pan-fried them in butter until crispy.

To be honest, it actually looked pretty good. 

 I gave the girls some to try, and they really liked it!  Which is odd, because they both don't like eating potatoes.  They were going to eat all of them, until I saved five for my husband.  I would say that this recipe was a success!

Oh, and I had a LOT of leftover mashed potatoes.  So I made Shepherd's pie.  =)