1hourfromsiberia: Yesterday my aunt and uncle arrived and stole me away from one party to bring me to another one. Turned out that their family was making pelmeni per their own new years traditions, so we joined in! If you don’t know, pelmeni is just russia’s version of dumplings. They are traditionally made by hand - though I know that forms are sold for making them easily as well. Here we had an assembly-line like thing going where one person was rolling the dough and using a shotglass to cut out the circles. The rest were stuffing the meat (typically pork, or a mix of pork and sometimes lamb or beef, whatever. Usually some sort of spices and onions are added in). We had two different pelmeni form types going on - the round ones, which I believe are more west-slavic traditional, and the ones with the braid, which the girls from a town southeast were used to making. The little pelmeni with the pepper seeds in it is the ‘lucky surprise’ which is typically made and hidden among the rest. If you end up being the one to eat it (or choke on it in surprise) then you’ll have luck for the rest of the year. They’re typically made in large amounts, and then frozen and eaten throughout the year. We made the fresh batch right away, just boiling them in water with some onions, bayleaf (sometimes dill and parsely are added for flavor too). I eat them with sour cream, but they can also be had with mayo or ketchup or just a bit of pepper.

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