It’s no secret that despite not being Catholic, I have a very fond affection for Lent. Last year, one of our Achievements was to go to a fish fry, and although it’s not *official* this year, we’ve been trying to do a new church each Friday.
But the other thing I love about the Easter season is the good Ukrainian food at the end of it! A good Ukrainian Easter always has the essentials: hard-boiled eggs, yummy bread, pierogies, cold ham, and most importantly, kielbasa.
You could say I was born to love kielbasa. It’s a Ukrainian Easter standard, and it’s every Yinzer’s go-to dish during the Stanley Cup Playoffs (except that we pronounce it “keh-bossy”). Additionally, it is now one of the foods I am capable of cooking.
We decided to have our Easter dinner a little early (and a little modified). Traditionally, we have all cold meats on Easter (I’m not sure why this is), but we decided to heat up the kielbasa and serve it with sauerkraut (which we pronounce ‘sahr-kraht’), as if we were preparing to watch Evgeni Malkin lift the Conn Smythe trophy all over again. We also heated up the pierogies we got from St. Regis’ fish fry last week!
Here are all the fixins’. The Miller Lite makes this dinner more Yinzer-legit, as we cook the kielbasa in beer. My family drinks Miller Lite, because it’s much classier than IC Light. I set out my little Ukrainian salt and pepper shakers for artistic effect.
Here is our yummy kielbasa cooking up in the beer. Note: don’t let it sit too long, because burnt Miller Lite just doesn’t smell good.
And the finished product! We fried the pierogies up in (fake) butter and onions from frozen, and they were awesome. Gosia’s is a local Pittsburgh pierogie-maker, and they have proved themselves to be the real deal (unlike Sienna Miller).
Here’s a nice closeup of that kraut and kielbasa. Yummmmm. I wish we could have early Easter every day!