My relationship with my mom was REAL complicated when she was alive, but I just cooked something and I wish I could call and tell her about it. So I guess I'm telling you.
Growing up my family made these things called cheese noodles. It's a mennonite thing. It's more commonly known as vareniki- don't at me if I spell it differently than you, there's about 4 different spellings in the family cookbook, and anyway it's an anglicization of a word not written with our alphabet. It's originally a Ukrainian dish, a version of pierogi I think? Filled dumpling noodle. pretty much everybody does some kind of filled noodle I think.
The one that became popular with mennonites used farmer's cheese, which later became cottage cheese. I think it's usually served with a ham or pork gravy with most mennonite recipes, my family always served with a cream or milk sauce instead. (sauce- take milk or cream, add salt and pepper to taste.)
The cottage cheese takes on this real interesting texture when it's cooked like this, and the egg noodle is always good. You plop butter on it as you cook them (because you do them in batches) and then Mom would always cut mine up for me (when I was little) and we'd put the sauce in.
It's a lot of labor. you gotta make an egg noodle dough roll, roll it out, fill it. that's more than I can do, right now. maybe if I get a pasta roller, I could do it, but it's just beyond my abilities right now. and my mom and grandma are dead, and I just don't really talk to the rest of my family, so I just don't get to have cheese noodles.
But I saw this recipe for lazy vareniki- this is a sweet version, so I subtracted the sugar and put pepper in the cottage cheese mixture. It doesn't need much rolling out, it took me almost no time to make from start to finish, probably 30 minutes max. and it was really good. it's not cheese noodles, not really. it's not quite the same, how could it be? but it's really a lot closer than I had any reason to expect. It's really good, it's scratching that itch and it barely took any effort. I could get some good amish egg noodles and cook them first and mix them in and I think that'd be pretty much as close as I can do without more machinery.
The last time I had cheese noodles was not long before she died, and my brother and I went to visit her, and she made sure to show us both how to make it. She wanted to be sure that we knew how. She spent that whole trip telling us goodbye and neither of us was really ready for that, but she seemed to know it was the last time.
She could be real mean, and was not really a good mom. But I just miss her, sometimes. And I was eating this and it's real good and I was thinking about her.
