There was a time in our life when Mrs. T’s Pierogis were a regular staple. Granted, it was when we lived in Boston for a few years – and we were miserable. We lived essentially at Cleveland Circle/Chestnut Hill Reservation at the juncture of Brighton, Allston, and Brookline. We worked at Coolidge Corners (yes, in the kooky clock building), together as professional testing proctors. There weren’t a lot of reasons we were miserable – we met some amazing people that we will know as friends for life (Spencer, Vanessa, Eric, Ben, Marcos & Denise – my dears, I miss you all so much), and had a couple of friends already there (Fisch & Will, Boo & Sayo, & Matty, the former pairs seemingly long lost but we love you bunches, and the latter came to Maine, as well – thank goodness you are here), some family lived near, and our jobs were fine. Not stimulating but fine. We saw shows all the time which was good, we ate and drank in fancy restaurants (or at least fancy to us), we walked around the reservoir, we made art and music in our tiny but lovely apartment.

We also ate and drank way too much (or at least, too much junk food) and though we walked to work, and hiked our groceries back in the granny-cart (uphill), we got fat and frustrated. There was nowhere for us to really grow – the people that weren’t our friends tended to be really rude, and the library was too far away though we do miss some of our favorite haunts (the crepe place below our office, the Brookline Booksmith, Boca Grande, the Thai Noodle place around the corner from us, the fancy pub halfway between home and work, the Pho place in Allston that had a second home in Cambridge, that great little spot for Margaritas on the backside of the Harvard Book Store, Trident Bookstore on Newbury – along with the Fluevog shoe store and Newbury Comics, the Allston Super 88 Asian grocery and the antiques building across from it – these were our regular jaunts around town besides shows at the Middle East/Paradise/Great Scott, etc).

But our favorite activities tended to be things like watching the rainbow of green/brown/purple snails come out in our neighborhood on rock walls and ledges, spying the swans and geese at the reservoir park, punctuated by watching the T (commuter rail) catch on fire one night (the windows melting right onto the tracks), and a few cars that would inevitably miss the carriage road median ending up stuck right on top of it, or the 20-man brawl erupting from the college boy apartment right below us (did I mention we were smack in between Boston University and Boston College?).

All that to say, we were relieved to find an escape route to Portland, Maine for a few years and then farther to our little outpost here at Rock Bottom. We’re happy to grow and support community foods and not eat boxes of frozen foods (when we weren’t galivanting around Boston-town). It’s honestly been years since I have had pierogi (or boxed chicken, for that matter – ahem) but we decided they sounded super exciting and delicious and homey these country snowy days. Jump in, they are easier than you think and oh, so satisfying.

The thing about pierogi is that you have such a great variety of good Winter stuffings to make. Classic mashed potato and caramelized onion/garlic/shallots, or potato and cheese: cheddar/jack/parmesan, or change up the potato adding sweet potato or roasted rutabaga/turnip/parsnip/carrot to the mix, savory herbs are a good match, bits of bacon/pork/sausage/turkey/chicken – ground or shredded, add some spinach or broccoli to the potato mix, or even apple or cabbage to give good texture and flavor. You could even mash or rice roasted cauliflower instead of potato. You could get wild and add mango chutney or green chili to the root mash. I think the key is too not make your filling too wet since you are wrapping it in a lovely pasta moon. Then boil, bake, and fry if desired. Serve with sour cream, red beet relish, horseradish, or even salsa depending on your lovely filling of choice or alongside classics like Polish Kielbasa and sautéed cabbage. Enjoy!

Pierogies for the People
Serves 6

For the dough:
4 cups All-purpose Flour
1 teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 cup Whole Milk
2 Eggs lightly beaten
1/4 cup Sour Cream

For the filling:
5 large Russet Potatoes peeled and quartered (or other roots, or a mix)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3 Tbsp Butter, for Potato mash
1/2 – 1 cup Whole Milk, depending on desired creaminess of potatoes
1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar Cheese
3 Tbsp Butter, for onions
3 large Vidalia Onions diced
1 Tbsp dried herb (Rosemary, Sage, or Thyme)

HOW TO MAKE PIEROGI DOUGH:
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, blend together the flour and salt on low speed.
Whisk together the milk, egg and sour cream. Slowly add the milk mixture to the flour in a steady stream.
Continue to blend the flour mixture together until a shaggy dough forms and the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl.
Cover the dough with plastic wrap and allow to rest for 1 hour.
This pierogi dough recipe is soft….the stand mixer makes it come together so quickly but you can totally do this by hand if you don’t have a stand mixer.

HOW TO MAKE PIEROGI FILLING:
Add the potatoes to a pot and fill with water to just cover the potatoes. Stir in the salt and bring the potatoes to a boil.
Turn the heat to low and continue cooking the potatoes until fork tender, approximately 20 minutes.
While the potatoes are cooking, melt the butter for onions in a large skillet over medium heat.
Add the onions to the pan. Cook until caramelized and golden brown, approximately 20 minutes.
Drain the potatoes and transfer to a large bowl.
Add the onions, milk, butter, cheese, and herb to the potatoes. Mash using a potato masher until well blended.
Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

To assemble pierogis: Knead rested dough lightly (but not too much), roll out to about 1/8″ thickness and cut into 3″ rounds (find a glass or storage bowl to use as cutter for evenness). Scoop 1-2 tbsp scoops of filling and put in center of round. Fold over edges and crimp with fork into hand-pie half moons. Set aside on lightly floured surface until ready to cook (or freeze, see Note below)

To cook your Homemade Potato Pierogi, you have a few options. Put pierogi into a pot of salted boiling water and cook until they float to the top, and then one minute more. Or you can simply pan fry your potato pierogis in a skillet with more caramelized onions (and Red and Green Bell Peppers) and lots of butter. The onion butter is a great sauce for your potato pierogi! OR you can do both….boil then pan fry for crispiness, if desired.

Note: You can also freeze them after assembling but before cooking – put them on a cookie sheet with parchment paper in a single layer and freeze overnight, then put into freezer bags. Do not thaw to cook – either boil as normal or put into skillet with a bit of water to soften and saute in olive oil or butter.

Oh, the cold breezes sweep in, the rain last night has already crusted over into ice and there’s apparently snow on the way (such is Winter life in Maine). It’s grey and the trees are bare, hints of greenery still pretend they have a chance – hopefully they are storing up as much as they can into their sleepy roots in hopes of a cozy hibernation. If it weren’t for a good solid freeze here we wouldn’t have all the things we love, like lilacs, and apples, maple syrup, lupines, coneflowers, milkweed and then all their attractors and supplements. Our seas would be affected, too, and our smelts, Maine shrimp, and even the ever popular lobster would move on to more appropriate watery pastures -it’s a dead giveaway that I am from away since I prefer the Chesapeake Blue Crab to lobster any day.

Don’t get me wrong, I like lobster but it’s not the end-all-be-all that some make it to be, it’s a nice treat every now and again. And from away – like that is a bad thing – if there weren’t people to move around this beautiful planet, how could we inject continuity of the species, or new industry and *gasp* new ideas, let alone mix up the gene pool a bit. Where I am from, we call the same folk flatlanders, which is pretty much what some New Englanders would call us, even though I’m from the mid-Appalachians and the culture is the same as here in Maine, and Josh is from Vermont – go figure. There is no sense to paper borders to me, no sense at all. It’s a shame to blame a fear of change on people instead of the proper and improper use of direct democracy (to which New England holds dear).

Anyway – comfort food is in order when the cold winds blow. And no time better than this damn year (2020 may be over but as another ‘paper border’, we still have sensitive situations that will continue) to find some comfort. With that said, this is not a fancy Macaroni and Cheese dish – but it is a cheesy cozy lowbrow one. It is also not our lovely friend Sophia’s awesome Smack n Cheese which has some sort of magickal faerie dust in it and she uses Cavatappi pasta (corkscrew shaped – to which I just spent 20 minutes on the interwebs trying to find the name for -ha!) which is really quite brilliant because they capture and hold the cheesey goodness that much better.

This has lots of preference options – add veggies like broccoli or cauliflower (parboiled) or herbs (like sage, thyme, or rosemary), bacon, sausage or shredded chicken, and the cheese you like best – cheddar, jack, American (and you can even tailor spices to enhance your cheese, like nutmeg for cheddar, green chili or some ancho with the jack, etc). You can even just make the noodles and roux and eat straight away like an ooey-gooey warm bowl of love or bake into a full casserole. And if you want to make it into a super fancy dish, I won’t judge you if you put lobster in it.

Rock Bottom Mac & Cheese
Serves 4

1 pound dry pasta of choice (I do Elbows but I’m not adverse to mini shells or Orecchiette or Fusilli), cooked per package instructions, al dente
3 Tbsp Butter plus 2 Tbsp to top a casserole if desired
1/4-1/3 cup All-purpose Flour
3 cups Milk
1-2 cups Shredded Cheese (up to you how much cheese you like!)
Salt & Pepper to taste
1 cup Breadcrumbs (optional)

Make a Roux: [If making a full casserole, preheat oven to 350 degrees]. In a heavy bottom Medium pot, melt 3 Tbsp Butter on Medium heat. When melted add 1/4 cup AP Flour and stir until clumpy and dry. Add Milk 1/2 cup at a time, whisk until becomes uniform. Continue adding Milk 1/2 cup at a time until consistency is thick (you are making a thick gravy). Add shredded Cheese a handful at a time, stirring into sauce until thick and still creamy.

Then add cooked pasta: warm together for a few minutes if you are eating immediately or stir in any additions (like spices, herbs, meats, veg), Salt & Pepper to taste, and pour into ovenproof casserole dish (I use a 9×13). Liberally sprinkle on Breadcrumbs, and cut remaining Butter into pats, placing randomly over crumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees, for 20-30 minutes until Breadcrumbs are golden brown (if you are using a clear casserole dish you may also see the pasta and cheese getting golden). Then be gentle with yourself because it is so tempting to eat straight away but it is super hot!! Enjoy ;).

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Apples for love – a perfect cake for any occasion but this occasion happens to be our 24th Anniversary (yes, 24 – really!). We weren’t that young (but still pretty young) which makes us likely older than you thought we were, but we’ve had many lives. We’ve lived many places and have had many adventures (and many adventures to come!). This homestead life of ours is a relatively new endeavor though we have always gravitated to the fringes of sufficient systems – which is to say, we’ve always been a little weird.

We look pretty normal (well, relatively speaking) and I think we lead a pretty ‘normal’ life (almost too normal somedays) but I have little to compare it to – our small enclaves of artist, activist, academic, and appreciators of these things, this is a pretty normal life. But we know the truth – that behind this air of apparent sanity – we are freaks (esp Josh, maybe if you know me, you already think or know I’m weird but he fools you right up to the edge – ha!).

We got married because we thought it would be funny. It wasn’t really a secret, we just didn’t tell anyone. We thought it was the last thing anyone would think of either of us doing. We had only been really dating for about 6 months (I had been living in VT not even a year from NJ) and our ‘dating’ consisted of selling all of our possessions, buying a beat up car and driving from Vermont to New Orleans visiting everyone we knew down the East Coast. It took us a couple of months to get there – we tried to find a place to live but we had spent most of our money on the way (friends wired us money to come back North). We ran out of ideas to avoid Vermont but returned anyway to find a place to live and maybe some jobs. Then we got it in our heads to slip off to the Town Office of Shoreham, VT and persuade them to find a judge to marry us Christmas Eve morning. He was a very kind older man who left his family to give us a short but sweet ceremony (Judge Douglas; later his daughter would be my manager at a retail/gallery job) and then we went to buy dog food for our naughty Malamute/Lab mix who – while we were getting married was happily munching on my favorite blue hat.

I’m not sure about Josh’s direct observations but I know I became a person with him. I was just an idea before, but through all our trials and adventures somehow I became a budding practice, a real person. Believe it or not, I was even a terrible cook when we first met (mmm, crunchy rice casserole) and he was brimming with patience (something I have chipped away at over the years – ha!). But for us, it’s always been about love and happiness (thank you, Reverend Al Green) – if it didn’t fit those parameters, it was time to change. He is the space I call home. He is the place I call love.

May you enjoy all the love that enriches you.

Onto the cake – we’ve been making this cake for about 10 years now from Food52. It’s a bit of a staple (though sometimes I make a different ‘less flour’ version that is a little more dense and just as delicious. I’m definitely one of those people who loves the kind of rye/fig/olive oil/spice flavors in a cake. Renee Erickson makes a stunningly dreamy dark Molasses Spice Cake with pepper and orange zest that is an adventure in itself.) This cake makes a great coffee cake, mature birthday cake, or an everyday give-me-some-cake kind of deal. I prefer a Bundt pan for all cakes, it’s just my thing but a Tube (Angel Food) pan works great, too. The secret is the low and slow cooking.

Apples, love indeed.

Deep South Apple Cake

2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cooking oil of your choice
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 juice of a lemon
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
3 cups peeled and chopped fresh apples
1 1/2 cups chopped pecans (optional)
2 eggs, well beaten

• Preheat oven to 325F (160C) degrees. Grease a tube or Bundt pan and dust with flour.
• Combine sugar, oil, vanilla extract, eggs, lemon juice, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Beat well.
• Mix flour and baking soda then add to the first mixture and beat well.
• Add apples and pecans, if using, and mix well.
• Pour into prepared tube pan.
• Bake 1 ½ hours, until golden on top. Let sit a few minutes, then unmold.
• You can dust the top with a little Confectioner’s Sugar, if desired. This cake is great warm or cold (the next day is super delicious).