Cooking for Ukrainian Christmas

We made ninety-five varenyky this afternoon, for Ukrainian Christmas Eve tomorrow. Here are some of them:

Cooking for Ukrainian Christmas

Today we made (across both pictures, but please don’t count – I bet I’m wrong!) 90 potato varenyky (Ukrainian dumplings) for Ukrainian Christmas Eve tomorrow night. The traditional Christmas dinner is huge, with twelve foods served.

The varenyky took several hours to make. The second picture is of the gluten-free lot – my fault! They look different, but taste the same. The first picture is the normal stuff. They’re not obviously cooked in these photographs!

The borscht was made yesterday – it tastes better after sitting a day or two. There’s still a lot more to make!

Making Varenyky

Cooking for Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow night. (I say it every year because everyone asks me, but we’re Catholic, not Orthodox! It’s not just Orthodox Christmas!)

Varenyky are dumplings. You can have any filling, but we’re only doing potato this year. With the death of my grandmother, we’re having to learn to take over and learn how to make all the foods.

Ukrainian Christmas

We had an afternoon making varenyky for Ukrainian Christmas Eve tomorrow.

Ukrainian Christmas

Today is Ukrainian Christmas Eve (and, of course, Christmas Eve for other countries, too). We’re Ukrainian Catholic (though not very good at practicing our religion!) – people often make the mistake of thinking it is ‘Orthodox Christmas’. It’s drives me batty how the media reports it that way every year, and also with Easter. It’s all about following an older calendar, not the Orthodox religion.

Most of the celebrating is done on the 6th, rather than on Christmas Day.

Anyway, Saturday night was spent baking, and Sunday was spent making the traditional Ukrainian foods. Here are some of our finished varenyky, taken yesterday afternoon.

Arnott’s Australia

So… Arnott’s makes Australia-themed biscuits. Maybe this is something that has been happening for a long time, but it was a new discovery for me!

Good thing Australia – though they left Tasmania off – comes in a fairly easy shape. I don’t know how they’d manage to make biscuits of Greece… Or Fiji…