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Put 'em Up! Fruit

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Potato and Cheese Pierogis with Apple and Pear Sauce

Setting up a Tom Cruise movie in the kitchen to help me, my boyfriend and I started this New Years resolution journey with two recipes from the Put 'em Up! Fruit cookbook.  Broken up into two recipes: Apple and Pear Sauce and Potato and Cheese Pierogi;  I had done the shopping for the sauce recipe thinking I'd start slow with my resolution, but come to find out I had all the ingredients to make the pierogis too.  Perfect since they were paired together in the cookbook.

Apple and Pear Sauce

Very similar to an apple sauce as far as texture and taste; we peeled and we chopped, and I cooked.  The recipe didn't call for peeling and chopping before cooking, but I misread the recipe (I'll be honest).  Turns out my inability to read the whole recipe first was perfect because I didn't own a food mill and ended up blending the mixture once tender anyway.

We ate this sauce like it was regular apple sauce.  It was DE-lish!!

Potato and Cheese Pierogi

While the sauce was cooking down, I started to boil the potatoes.  Making the pierogi stuffing per the recipe was easy like a glorified mashed potato recipe.  Note: the stuffing process would have gone so much better if I followed the recipe and let the potato mixture cool (baby steps).

  

The dough was the tricky part to this whole thing!!  From rolling to cutting to stuffing; this was the time consuming part of the whole thing (my boyfriend left the house just before this step, good timing Shayne).

After the first 30 pierogis were made, I did some research on the internet and learned that you can freeze these until you're ready to cook and eat them at a later date.  Yeah!!  So I then continued to make another 20 pierogis.

I cooked up some turkey sausage then fried the pierogis in the same pan for additional flavor (not part of the cookbook or recipe), that is after I boiled them. 

Even though this took close to six hours of doing, IT WAS WORTH IT!!  The dish as a whole (with the sausage too) was so incredibly tasty.  And I have more in the freezer for later.