Another Polish dumpling recipe

Potatoes, rice, pasta, sweet potatoes, new potatoes, rice again... If you would welcome another carb onto your dinner plate, then look no further than these simple dumplings

They are called "kluski kładzione", which translates as "laid dumplings" (more or less) because we "lay" them onto the water (that's why the lack of uniformity). Language is like a window into another world, therefore my tendency is always to try and explain, yet often translating Polish to English makes very little sense. The way that these languages are formed and used, the imagery surrounding them, the associations... they really are like two different planets

Here are those dumplings replacing potatoes or rice with a dinner of lamb and cucumber salad. They are fantastic with any kind of sauce or gravy...

And here they are again, showing off their versatility as a pudding, fried on some butter with a dash of cinnamon and a spoonful of honey

Ingredients

300g plain flour

2 eggs

Pinch of salt

Water

Blend these ingredients together, by hand of in a blender, to create a batter that's similar to pancake batter but much thicker and stickier - this batter does not come off the spoon easily. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil. Take a spoon and put it in a cup of freshly boiled water for about 3min. Use the spoon to take a bit of the batter and place it into the water. You need to do this quickly and efficiently, yet without splash back. You may need to cook them in two batches. When they swim to the top, give them a couple of minutes extra and remove

Sweet pumpkin and walnut dumplings

It dawned on me today, as I was sitting cross-legged on a quiet, sunny spot on the South Downs, my unkempt hair falling across my bare, shiny face, that I turn into a complete crusty when I'm in Eastbourne. It's something about being so near to the Downs I think, and with these massive windows we have in our house it's like I become a part of this windswept, weird landscape. There is not that much to do here, yet I am quite happy whiling away the hours cooking, walking and chatting to my parents. This morning my mum and I made pumpkin dumplings

I'm making yet another attempt at generally avoiding sugar and, yet again, my mum has tempted me away from my goal with these gorgeous little mouthfuls of sweet, nutty pumpkin dough. They are a different take on the Polish "lazy dumplings", where we use white curd cheese instead of squash. Actually, yes this is a good point - you can use both pumpkin and orange squash for this - in Polish-speak they are considered the same thing

Halve the pumpkin or squash, take out the seeds, pour over a little olive oil and bake in a very hot oven for about 40min, until you can easily take the flesh out with a spoon. You only need half for this recipe, it makes plenty of dumplings (enough for 4 people). So, allow it too cool a little then scoop the flesh out, add the flour, egg, half the cinnamon and the caster sugar and make the dough. If it's too sticky, add some more flour. Right at the end work the crushed walnuts into the dough and roll it between your hands into a flat, snake shape like that up there. Cut it diagonally and cook in a pan of boiling, slightly salted water. When they pop to the top, give them one more minute, then remove them with one of those spoons with lots of holes in (what are they called again?), allowing as much of the water to drain as possible. Cook them in a large pan and in rounds, not all at once. Once done, place on a large plate with some butter over the top, so that they don't all stick together. You can eat them immediately with brown sugar and more cinnamon, or re-fry later. Both ways are equally delicious

Ingredients

Half a pumpkin or large squash, pureed

400g plain flour

1 egg

4 tablespoons caster sugar

100g walnuts, crushed 

2 teaspoons cinnamon

Pinch of salt

Brown sugar to serve

Butter to serve

Babcia Halinka's pierogi - sauerkraut and mushroom Polish dumplings

It's a strange kind of sadness when your last grandparent dies. Of course, at 33, my childhood is long behind me, yet while any grandparent still lives, there is still a connection, someone who still sees you in that way. My Babcia Halinka was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and died in Warsaw, Poland, just before her 90th birthday. The culture in Poland is such that as a child, your grandmothers help to bring you up. So Babcia Halinka took me for long walks around Warsaw every weekend, she took me to the theatre and to Chopin concerts in Lazienki Park in the Summer. Her cupboards were filled to the brim with old clothes and materials, which I used to dress up in to perform. There were always plenty of cushions on her Bohemian furniture and I used these to make a nest for myself, something I will always associate with that time in my life, and I still find myself trying to recreate now. I'd run round and round her flat, in which every room was connected to the next. Or we'd cook in her tiny little dark kitchen (it was in the middle of the all these inter-connected rooms). This is how she would make "pierogi" and her favourite filling of sauerkraut and mushrooms, a recipe she passed on to her daughter-in-law (my mum) and my mum gave to me just yesterday, when I announced the sudden urge to make dumplings. I felt close to my gran making these today, in the same way she used to do, all those times, in that dark, little kitchen outside of time

Ingredients

400g plain flour

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons butter, melted

4-5 tablespoons boiled, tepid water

Pinch of salt

4-5 mushrooms, chopped

large handful sauerkraut

small onion, chopped

olive oil and butter

salt and pepper

Sift the flour into a bowl and add the yolks, butter and salt. Blend with your fingertips, then stick together to make dough, adding the water, bit by bit. Kneed the dough for about 7-8min, before covering in a damp towel and leaving to rest for 20min. Make the filling by frying the onion in a large knob of butter until golden. Add the mushrooms and fry until the water has evaporated. Cook the sauerkraut by simmering in a pan of water for about 15min. Blend everything. Add some olive oil if you are finding it difficult to blend. Fry the mushy ingredients all together in some more butter, or olive oil if you don't want to overdo it on the butter front. Allow to cool. Now roll out the pierogi dough on a floured surface, as thin as you can. Use a large cup to cut circles in the dough of about 9-10cm in diameter. Any less than 9cm and it gets a little hard to get a decent amount of filling in. Use a teaspoon to put in a dollop of filling into the middle of each circle. Flatten the edges before you attempt to stick them together. Press hard, be bold. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and place about 6 pierogi in at a time. Cover. Once they float to the top (you'll have to check every minute or so), give them another 5min, then remove. You can eat them like this, but I like to fry them in a mixture of butter and olive oil first, it makes them even tastier in my opinion

Autumn plum dumplings - Knedle

Although I'm back in Autumnal London now, I still have one thing left to tell you about from Poland. It's one of my all time favourite dishes - plum dumplings. We used tiny little plums for these we call "the Hungarians", or if you want to be really precise they're the Hungarian women ("Wegierki"). Don't ask me why in Poland every food has to have a nationality, because I haven't a clue, but it is quite sweet. Unless you take offense at having a plum, mushroom or type of herring named after you. Anyway, these tiny plums fit perfectly, one into each dumplings, but I haven't seen them in England, so you may just need to us half a normal plum. You can also make delicious "knedle" with peaches, if you prefer, or even strawberries, but in my family, it's always been plum

Ingredients

350g potatoes, mashed without butter

125g flour

1 small egg

pinch of salt

250g plums (peaches/strawberries)

100g breadcrumbs

50g butter

Brown sugar to serve

If you doubled the ingredients, you would still only need a large egg. Really for this amount, you need half an egg, but since that doesn't exist (unless you have a quail's egg handy), we used a whole one. This made the mixture a bit wet, but this doesn't matter, you just need lots of flour when forming it. You combine the mashed potatoes with the flour, salt and egg and blend with your hands, until you create a doughy consistency. Then, roll it into a baguette shape, like you can see on the second photo up there. Cover the plumbs with plenty of brown sugar. Cut the baguette shape into even slices, and make a little dent in each one - the sugary plum goes in here. Seal it thoroughly. Bring some water to the boil and place all the dumplings in it. Whilst they're cooking, melt some butter in a frying and add the breadcrumbs - cook until nice and brown. When the dumplings swim out to the top, they're kind of ready, but they'll taste better if you give them a few more minutes - maybe 5-6. Drain them, then transfer to the frying pan with breadcrumbs. Make sure that they are all properly coated and add brown sugar to taste. A great dish for when you feel that first nip of Autumn in the air, the only thing that could have made it better for me would have been a lovely, cold glass of Gewurztraminer

Lazy dumplings or Pierogi leniwe

I haven't been blogging much recently as I haven't really been eating. I have lost nearly a stone already on the break-up diet, which consists of cigarettes, the odd piece of toast and gallons of wine, and promises to take about five years off your life expectancy. Nevermind, I am now recuperating at the family home in Eastbourne, and I have decided to explore my mum's old Polish cookbook, from the communist era, which has always both fascinated and intimidated me

There are masses of different dumplings in here, but ones which have been "following me", as you'd say in Polish, are Pierogi leniwe...I think the last time I made these I was five years old in my grandma Hala's tiny, dark kitchen in Warsaw, and she'd let me cut the long dough strips. So, to be fair, I have never actually made them myself, but they are nevertheless close to my heart... I may as well show you what they look like now, so you can decide if it's something you fancy or not

Ingredients

500 grams white young cheese, I used ricotta

3 eggs

150 grams flour

30 grams flour for rolling

60 grams butter

20 grams breadcrumbs

Pinch salt

About 2 tablespoons sugar

Single cream to serve

Whenever my mum has made these in the past she has used white cheese which she buys from the Polish shop. However, I wanted to use something easily accessible to everyone, so I tried ricotta today, which worked really well! Firstly, separate the egg yolk from the egg white. Blend the yolks with 30 grams of the butter, soft butter is best, so I stuck normal butter in the microwave for 10 seconds. This takes a little while, if you are to have no lumps. Then, add the ricotta/white cheese. Beat the whites until they form peaks and add these in too, as well as the 150 grams of flour. Mix it all in together, and add a good pinch of salt. It's now time to put a large pan of lightly salted water on heat, and bring it to the boil, while we work the dumplings

Now, clean the surface that you will be using to roll out the dough and cover with the remaining flour. Spread the mixture out on the flour and kneed into a ball, adding more flour to the bits which are too sticky

That's me kneeding it up there - after you have done this for about 5 minutes, separate the mixture into two or three, and it's time to start rolling it out into long strips. And that's my mum showing me how it's done, below

You have to be quite gentle, as this dough is really soft. Once you can't roll anymore, then just form it into this kind of a shape, and make sure it's covered in flour on all sides. It's a balancing act with the flour, you don't want to add too much as the dumplings will end up hard. But the mixture is too sticky to do anything with if there is not enough flour, so just use your instincts on this one, and next time you'll know. I say next time, because once you have tried these, I guarantee you'll make them again. It's quite a simple recipe, and they are delicious - a lovely balance of sweet and salty and totally moreish

Cut the strips into more or less this kind of a shape and size. Once the water is boiling, drop half the dumplings in, and stir gently so that they do not stick together. When the dumplings rise to the top, give them once more minute and drain them spoonful by spoonful, trying to get rid of as much as the water as possible, before placing on a serving dish

While the second lot is cooking, melt the rest of the butter on a frying pan, and brown the breadcrumbs - this should take about 2-3 minutes. Finally, we cover the dumplings in the breadcrumb sauce, sugar, and serve, with cream on the side. This is pure Polish comfort food!

Making dumplings with Mariana

Last night we had a great night making dumplings at my friend Mariana's house. It was easy, as we bought ready-made dumpling "skins" from a Vietnamese shop. And it turned out that even inexperience can't make a dumpling taste bad - they were all delicious!

We made 2 different dumpling fillings: pork and vegetable and crabmeat and spring onion. For 3 people I would recommend buying 3 packets of skins (the above packets have 15 each). We had 2 packets so we ended up with 10 dumplings each, which was fine but we had loads of filling left over!

Here are the ingredients for the pork and vegetable dumpling filling:

300 grams minced pork

half a cabbage

2 carrots

6 spring onions

soya sauce

And here's what we used for the crabmeat and spring onion dumpling filling:

Cooked crabmeat (you can use tinned crabmeat but I happened to find a freshly cooked whole crab)

4 spring onions

half a lime

garlic salt

For the pork and vegetable dumplings we grated the carrots and finely chopped the cabbage and spring onions, and cooked them in 2 separate pans.

We then made space in the bigger pan, poured a bit more oil in the gap, like that up there...

...and added the pork mince. We fried it like that until it changed colour, constantly breaking it up with a fork and chopsticks. Once it was cooked through we mixed all the vegetables from the other pan in with it, added some soya sauce and a splash of white wine (the is optional, we wanted to make sure the meat wouldn't dry out) and covered it up and let it cook for a bit longer. I'd say it cooked for about 20-25 minutes in total. Then we allowed it to cool, while we prepared the crabmeat filling:

This was super-easy: we just mixed the crabmeat with finely chopped spring onion and the lime juice and the garlic salt

And the dumpling fillings are ready! You can start off making the crab dumplings, while the pork mixture cools. So we got all our skins ready, grabbed some trays and some water in little bowls and the dumpling making began for real.

First things first: Mariana, who has a little bit of dumpling-making experience, showed us that you need to mould the inside of the skin a little bit for the dumpling mixture to have a bit of space

Then, you wet the edges with the water, stick a large teaspoon of your mixture in the middle...

And stick the sides together. that, down there, is the most simple shape, and a good place to begin:

But of course, after you have made a couple of simple ones to boost your confidence, and if you're a creative soul, you may want to experiment with different forms, like we did

And I'll tell you one thing I learnt about dumpling making last night: often, the weirder the shape, the tastier the dumpling. so you can't really go wrong. However, do make sure you seal it properly, so the filling doesn't seep out while cooking. If there are any you are not sure of, it's better to fry them. We fried half, and steamed half

And that was a great balance, so I'd recommend it to anyone. Then, a very important part of the process; dumpling dipping sauces: we used soya sauce and chilli oil. And 2 bottle of white wine also a welcome addition ;o) - all in all a lot of fun was had and I will definitely be repeating "dumpling night"

Of course, we only focussed on Asian style dumplings last night, and, in order to pay our dues, we discussed dumplings from other parts of the world- Poland, Spain, Mexico... I have a feeling that every country has their own dumpling-making tradition.