New Year's Feast...

This New Year's eve we decided to have a few close friends over to our house and our former tenant Rachel. I did not want to cook an extravagant meal, but there are some traditional dishes I felt the need to offer to our guests. Pork and sauerkraut is often eaten for good luck in the New Year. Since I am a vegetarian I do not eat pork, I usually force Brian to eat pork for both of us and I eat the sauerkraut. Our friend Nicole said that it was the best pork she had ever eaten so I suppose I did a good job preparing it. Have a look:

I used a pork butt roast cooked with sauerkraut. Since moving to Ohio I have had sauerkraut on every New Year, one thing I did not like about some I have had was the addition of brown sugar to sweeten up the sauerkraut. I do not know why, but cabbage and brown sugar is not appealing to me. A friend gave me the idea of adding an apple to the roast in place of the sugar in order to add a bit of sweetness. I started the roast off as I do all of my roasts. I seared the generously salt and peppered roast in a very hot pan until a brown crust formed. I put the roast into a slow cooker filled with chicken broth. I then surrounded the roast with sauerkraut.


I then grated an onion and honeycrisp apple and topped the roast with those.


Brian and I have lived in quite a few places and one thing that excites me about a new place is trying the different types of foods and learning how to cook new dishes. There is a large Polish population in North East Ohio and they have given me the opportunity to try some very delicious foods such as haluski and pierogi. I make haluski from time to time, but I have never had the courage to tackle pierogi. Everyone I had spoken too strongly advised against it because it was such a labor intensive task. That only made me want to make them more. Have a look.

Of course we turned to Martha Stewart for a how-to on making pierogi. Martha's mother taught her how to make pierogi so we knew we could trust the recipe.

The filling for the pierogi had to be flavorful. Potatoes, cream cheese, cheddar cheese an, how could you go wrong? The recipe said it made a total of 60 pierogi, but we ended up with about 120.


The pierogi we first made looked a bit rough, but after we passed up the 50 mark they looked perfect.


When the pierogi were boiled we divided them into two portions.


One portion was served with carmelized onions and brown butter.


The other half was served with bacon.


And of course a generous spoonful of sour cream.


I wish I had some right now. Everyone loved them and our friend Nicole who is actually Polish said I could be honorary Polish. Here is our table full of hors devours and snacks. We had a fun game of taboo had a few too many spirits.


Happy New Year everyone! Try and make some pierogi of your own.