Symon Sundays: Beef Cheek Pierogies with Wild Mushrooms and Horseradish

This week's Symon Sunday's selection was chosen by Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. Please check her blog for the recipe and the many other beautiful and delicious posts she has!

I have made pierogies once before, the traditional way with potato and cheese, but when I saw this recipe, I was very excited to try something new! Growing up, we often had pierogies with my great-grandmother. She would boil them then fry them with onions and butter with a hearty scoop of sour cream. They were absolutely delicious.

This recipe takes the familiarity of pierogies, but gives them a gourmet twist. The recipe is written with beef cheeks, but I opted to use a different cut of meat. Because I was making half the recipe, I went with a 4 oz. filet of beef but kept the other ingredient amounts at half. The filling was so flavorful, like no other pasta filling I've had before.

For the mushroom portion of this dish, I went with a gourmet blend that I found at Whole Foods. I was unable to find many of the mushrooms Chef Symon's recipe calls for, and exhausted all of my local resources trying to find them! The horseradish cream was a delicious substitute for the usual sour cream. It was spicy, and balanced out the earthiness of the mushrooms and beef. Overall this was a delicious dish, and another example of how Chef Symon takes many of his old, family favories and turns them into gourmet dishes for today.

Here are Joanne's variation of the pierogi:

And Natashya's lovely pierogi:

And Tasha's, they look so crispy and perfectly formed!