Dough great, fillings not so great--Kolaczki

Kolaczki
The Ugly Binder, from the internet

1 cake yeast
5 cups flour
1/2 pound butter (softened)
1/2 pound crisco
3 egg yolks
1 cup sour cream
Solo Canned Filling - Many varieties to choose from.

Crumble yeast into flour. Add shortening and butter as for pie dough. Add egg yolks and sour cream. Mix well with hands. Shape into ball and cover with wax paper and refrigerate overnight.
On a clean rolling surface sprinkle a little flour and also flour the rolling pin lightly. Roll out only 1/4 of the dough at a time, otherwise the dough will become to soft. Roll the dough out to about 1/4 inch, cut into 3 inch squares. Place 1 tesp of filling into center of square, bring two ends of dough to center of square and pinch together to seal.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, bake on ungreased cookie sheet 15 to 20 minutes till golden. When cool sprinkle with powdered sugar if you like.
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I've been wanting to make Kolacky (it has many variations of spellings) for years. I remember this cookie from my childhood although the memory is murky. You can make these cookies using a non-yeast dough, sometimes using a cream cheese dough. My mother has probably made them both ways but I doubt she can remember exactly which recipes she's used over the years (I don't think there was just one). And I could be remembering cookies made by someone else, I'm just not completely sure. Getting older sucks.

One thing for sure is that the fillings I remember the most fondly are nut and farmer's cheese. I couldn't make nut filling since we avoid treenuts in our house and I haven't seen farmer's cheese in any stores locally although I will keep looking until I find it. I found an internet source but the cost with shipping was outrageous. I had to settle for other fillings.

I enjoyed this dough - it was easy to put together and actually very easy to work with. Next time I might roll in out in powdered sugar instead of flour but otherwise it was exactly what I wanted. I didn't care for the Solo fillings I used (prune and apricot) or the cream cheese filling I made. The Solo fillings were fine but they aren't very sweet. That's great when you're using them to fill a sweetened cake or cookie but this dough isn't sweet at all. Growing up, we had access to better lekvar (prune filling) that was sweeter and more flavorful. Cream cheese just isn't a substitute for farmer's cheese either.

So I'll keep working on fillings for this recipe. Maybe someday I'll find farmer's cheese again. I finally found Fage Greek yogurt! I've been looking everywhere for that and I finally found a somewhat local source and it is definitely better than any other plain yogurt I've tried.

I haven't really started cooking again yet. Tonight I'm going to try a new wing recipe, modified a bit and make some regular hot wings, just to be safe in case the new recipe is a bust. I'm going to make a flank steak and then some cocktail weiners in grape jelly and chili sauce. It's sort of a tradition to make dinner out of appetizers on New Year's Eve at our house. I'll round things out with some veggies and dip and maybe pull out some of my homemade pepper jelly and pour it over some cream cheese.

Blast From The Past: Marinated Flank Steak from May 2007. OMG! I can't believe that was from all the way back in May. This year flew. I'm using that recipe tonight. My son loved it.

Question of the Day: Do you have any special plans for New Year's Eve? That's one holiday I think we all celebrate.