My husband’s favorite comfort foods seem to involve Polish favorites: sauerkraut, polish sausage, and pierogi of all sorts. File pierogi under the foods that aren’t worth making from scratch, by the way, but there’s a solution. Well, there’s two. You can make your own Shortcut Pierogi:

QUICK TIP:
For shortcut pierogi, boil some large pasta shells and make some mashed potatoes. For better flavor, add leeks, cheese, sour cream, etc. Instead of using a ricotta cheese mixture in the shells, fill them with mashed potatoes for easy carbohydrate goodness. Thanks to my friend Samm for this awesome idea!!

OR, you can buy your pierogi frozen. I’m fortunate to live in a very Polish area, so we have a number of places where we can buy delicious frozen pierogi of all sorts. Kraut, Potato & Cheese, and even Plum for an interesting mix of sweet and savory.

For this meal, we had a batch of Kraut & Mushroom pierogi gifted to us by my Polish grandma-in-law. I served them alongside a mish mash of kraut, polish sausage, golden potatoes and spinach. I think I’m going back to bagged fresh kraut because the canned stuff is just so, so salty, but it was super tasty.