Perogies for Lunch.

When I was growing up on the Canadian prairies, in as Ukrainian a family as it is humanly possible to be, we ate a lot of perogies. Only we did not call them perogies, we called them perohy.
Pronounced “peh”... as in pedophiles, “ro”... as in roast, and “heh” as in hell.
Peh - ro - heh.
And when you say the "ro" part, you have to make sure your tongue touches the roof of your mouth, or else you are saying it wrong. You have to get that subtle European "rh" sound in there.
Here is a nice picture of a plate of perohy, served alongside that essential Ukrainian mealtime beverage... a snifter of borscht!
Yes, I was raised on this stuff.
If it were not for perohy, I probably would have died at a very young age... from.... dough deficiency or something. But thankfully, every day or two, I would eat a couple dozen perohy that my mother made, and I survived. We ate a lot of these, seriously we did. Loaded with sour cream, fried onions. Our concept of dessert, back then, was..... a few MORE perohy.
This is probably the source of my present shape, now, as a middle-aged man. Sort of tapered at each end, thick in the middle, basically a big pillow-case on legs, and filled with mushy potatoes.
No, that is an exaggeration really, I am being overly mean to myself here.
The walking pilowcase is filled with sauerkraut, occasionally letting off gaseous bursts, just like it does when fermenting in the crock, under a weighted plate .
For those of you who were not raised eating perohy every day of your childhood, I will briefly explain that they are made from dough that is rolled out and then cut into little triangular shapes. These are then filled with a potato and cheese mixture, or perhaps sauerkraut, or slow-running animals... pretty much anything you want to cram in there I guess, and then the resultant little pillowcase is pinched together at all the edges, and then these perohy are boiled for a while, and they can be eaten just like that, drawn from the boiling water, BUT it is always better, and less healthy, to drain off the water and fry the perohy in tons of onions and butter, and then serve this with a tub of sour cream.
Sweet blessed Lord!

So [get to the point man!]... at the current time I have "temporarily-employed employees" working where I work, [I hate calling them temps, it sounds too impersonal, in an improper noun sort of way], so anyway, among these temps is one vivacious vixen from Poland. When I say from Poland I mean actually FROM there, and she has the wonderful accent to prove it.
So, me being Ukrainian and all, and Polish/Ukrainian/Russian being so similar in language and culture, over the past couple of weeks we have bantered back and forth with each other as to the translation of certain words and I have learned a lot about Poland, including the fact that, according to her, it is not as cold there as I had imagined. I always thought it was sort of Siberian or something. Year-round polar-bearski weather! You know?
Basically.... North Pole-ish!

So, just yesterday, I asked her about perohy.
She said she knows all about it.
I asked, “Yeah, but were you raised on it? Was it considered three of the four main food groups?”
“I know what perohy are!” she said.
“You don’t know perohy!” I yelled, [just like Tom Cruise, in Jack Nicholson’s face.]

“I MAKE THEM!” she yelled back.

Wow.
Silence in the warehouse.
I can’t top that claim. She called my bluff.
My feeble three-of-a-kind constant EATING of them, does not beat her full-house MAKING of them.

I said.... still wary like.... “Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will make some for you and then you will see.”
I did not believe her. I left it at that.
I guess it had been such a long time since I had seen a good plateful of perohy, that I just could not believe that this woman before me was a Perohy-Maker.

Fast forward to high-noon today, in the lunch-room at work....

We all cram in there like a herd of cattle and I start digging out one of these frozen dinners that you buy in your grocer’s freezer for $3.49. Every ingredient in the ol’ table of contents is a word containing nineteen letters, you know what I mean?
Well just then, Elizabeth, for this is her name, she hands me a tupperware container and says “Here, this is for you. I made this last night.”
And I take it, and it is full of perohy.
The real kind. Like from scratch. I almost died.
REAL PEROHY.
And I opened the container and looked, and they looked correct.
Like what I mean is there are at least a thousand ways to make perohy, some people make them the size of a hubcap, or a calzone, or a frisbee.... other people make them like little tater-tots!
But no.... here before me was a whole container of real, official, regulation-size perohy. The way they are supposed to look. The way MY mother made them.

So I started crying.
No, just kidding. I was stunned though, as I put them in the microwave.
To make this story even better, Edward, this other “temp” had SOUR CREAM!
All that was missing was a snifter of borscht!

So it is that I had the best lunch ever, today.
That is the final thing I must say. They were very good. Perfectly made.
Thank you Elizabeth. I apologize for all former lack of faith in your perohy abilities.
And if you are reading this..... umm... what’s for lunch tomorrow?
I feel in the mood for cabbage rolls.