Certus Stone

I so wish I had the foresight to take a picture of the giant peljmeni ball before breaking it up into much smaller peljmeni dumplings. It was glorious; roughly the size and shape of an American football and the weight of a large house cat.

The idea was simple: pre-make a few meals worth of peljmeni and freeze it to re-heat and eat later. My roommates and I expected the dumplings to clump together, but didn’t anticipate was that the dumplings in the center would compress and become one giant dumpling that couldn’t be split apart by conventional means.

It was a known issue by the time the peljmeni ball was sent to the freezer, so it sat there for weeks. No one wanted to face the reality of the situation which was that we had an 8 pound ball of starch in the freezer and eating it was going to take a lot of labor intensive prep-work.

Until last night…

The power of procrastination was so strong that we couldn’t allow this delicious monstrosity to lie in wait in the depths of our freezer for even one night more. We boiled a large pot of water to loosen the outer layers. When we were convinced that the starch-berg was as loose as we could make it without ruining the dish, we used spoons to pull and carve the dumplings out of their carbohydrate-based prison.

The result wasn’t pretty: lots of dough was lost, there were plenty of units that would require us to bite off smaller pieces, and almost none had the shape that we so carefully created them in. Despite, we dressed it up with chili powder, cilantro, sour cream, and Sriracha to make it look nice.

This picture was taken before consumption. The “Thug Kitchen” cookbook was unrelated to the peljmeni, but acted as a pretty backdrop.