Supermeow!

My grandmother used to make these fantastic rolled crepes called nalysnyky in Ukrainian. The recipe that my grandmother made (which she got from my great-grandmother who allegedly worked in the kitchen of some Russian nobleman) is apparently something of an oddity, at least it was an oddity among the people at my mom’s church growing up. My grandparents (all of them) came to the US after World War II ended: my mother’s parents and my father’s mother (plus my dad himself). There was a bit of a scene in Boston of Ukrainian immigrants who naturally did things like start churches. I guess this wasn’t a recipe that the other people at the church were familiar with, and even after looking at recipes on the internet, the filling seems to be fairly unique. After making them myself I can see why: it’s a lot of work. Varenyky and holotbsi are also a lot of work, but this is a crazy amount of work and uses a ton of butter. It’s one thing to have someone tell you that something’s a lot of work, it’s another to experience it yourself. I respect the ladies on my mother’s side of the family a lot right now! The typical recipe involves a filling made of cottage cheese, which I have never seen or consumed. The one my great-grandmother made uses cooked ground chicken (ground after it’s cooked), chopped hard-boiled egg, and fried onions. Fried onions and meat is not unheard of, but again, I’ve not seen any other recipes like this one, and if there’s anyone who knows the origin of this variant, I’d love to know more.

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Anyhow, the method is to first boil a chicken with some veggies (I used carrot, celery, leek, parsnip, turnip, onion, parsley, and dried garlic) and reserve the broth. You debone the chicken, reserving every bit of meat and no fat or bones. Deboning a boiled chicken will not be one of your favorite life experiences. You then grind the meat up (I used my food processor; my mom uses the meat grinder attachment for her KitchenAid mixer), which makes this weird chicken pudding-like substance. The meat is then fried in a pan to get rid of some of the moisture and make it more mealy and crumbly. You also fry some very finely diced onion (I used two large white onions) until they turn brown. You hard-boil and chop 3 eggs, yolks and all. The chicken, onion, and eggs are mixed together: this is your filling.

You then make crepes. If you haven’t made crepes before, and I hadn’t until this past week, it’s a bit tricky, especially if you have a really shitty spatula for your non-stick pan, which I do (and plan to remedy). The crepe batter is pretty much the same as a traditional crepe batter: I did 4 cups flour, 4 cups milk, 4 eggs, and a bit of salt. I later thinned the batter a bit with water (which I saw Julia Child do w/her batter). You then destroy about half of the crepes generated by tearing them or messing up the flipping step. The rest are left on a plate to be filled with your filling. Something you can do w/your less-perfect crepes is sprinkle a little sugar on them and make crepes avec sucre.

Then comes the part that had me in a frustrated rage (but to be fair, it doesn’t take much to send me into a frustrated rage). You fill the crepes with a couple tablespoons of filling and then roll them up like burritos. You dip them in egg, and then in breadcrumbs. You fry them on all four sides and let them drain. If you overfill them, they will fall apart on you, spilling their contents into your egg wash, breadcrumbs, frying pan, or all three, and if you’re like me and irritate easily when things don’t go perfectly, you will bellow with fury, hopefully to an empty house. I realized later that I was overfilling them. The first batch was made on December 30th – I didn’t finish all the nalysnyky because it had been such a frustrating experience to roll/destroy after all the work put into them to that point.

Anyhow, when you’ve finished frying, you then take the broth you made when boiling the chicken and serve your nalysnyky with a cup of broth on the side. The broth is drunk like a hot beverage. If you want to insult my grandmother’s memory, you could break up your nalysnyky into the broth (which I’m told was done by some Christmas carolers one year as she watched hours of work go down the drain in abject horror).

I would definitely like to make these again, but I am seriously in no rush. It’s a ton of work for experimentation. I wouldn’t even say that it’s a way I’d like to spend a weekend. It took me several days to make these, and my mother says it’s an all-day experience starting early in the morning if you’d like to have something ready for a 6PM dinner.