Nicole Rucker Archives

Crispy Pierogi with Pork and Dried Fruit

The best pierogi I’ve ever eaten in my life — one that ruined all other pierogi for me — was at Michael Symon’s now-closed restaurant Lola in Cleveland, Ohio. I still remember what it looked like: a half moon of crispy dough stuffed with beef cheeks. It was maybe one of the most decadent things I’ve ever tasted; somewhere between an empanada and a calzone; the amount of labor that went into it was evident with every bite. I vowed to make it some day from Symon’s cookbook (which has my favorite chili recipe) but never did.

Enter Nicole Rucker, this week’s guest on You’ve Got to Taste This. Nicole’s in a cookbook club (sorry men, it’s women only) and one of the most successful recipes they’ve ever tested happens to be the pierogi recipe that she sent me to make this week. They come from Zuza Zak’s cookbook Pierogi, which makes sense, and they’re stuffed with this magical mixture of caramelized pork blended with soaked dried fruit, boiled in salted water, and then sauteed in copious amounts of butter. Needless to say, they were an absolute trumph.

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Stressbake a Banana Cake

You could bite your nails right now, you could doomscroll through social media, or you could do what I’ve been doing: stressbake.

Stressbaking isn’t so much a strategy, as it is a state of mind. It’s where your body — your hands, your stomach, your taste buds — jump up into your brain and say: “Halt! No more perseverating. There’s work to be done.” In this case, the work involves taking very ripe bananas off of your counter and turning them into a cake.

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Nectarine Plum Pie with a Brown Sugar Crust

So I’ve been organizing all of my old posts into categories. It’s a huge process — over 3,500 posts covering a 15 year span — but it’s also oddly satisfying; like cleaning up a hoarder house. My goal is for you to be able to click “cakes” and to see every cake recipe I’ve ever posted.

On a personal level, reading through my archives is like watching myself grow up. My early posts were so dopey (remember when I wrote a song about frozen yogurt?) but also so innocent. Now I’m a jaded old man in my 40s! I started this blog when I was *gulp* 25. At least there’s the wisdom that comes with age. And nothing embodies how much I’ve grown than my relationship to pie dough.

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