If you ever have an urge to make pierogi

don't. At least don't make the frozen supermarket kind.

Dear Katie,

You may think "the pierogi at the restaurant were so good!" And you may remember having seen them at the supermarket. Don't be fooled.

We wanted to have a break from spaghetti stir fry, which we eat a lot. And we ate at a pierogi restaurant a while ago with our Polish acquaintances. It was very tasty. So tonight at the supermarket we decided to mix it up. We got some meat pierogi, some potato croquettes and some strawberry pierogi for dessert. All of them required extensive boiling, which was fine.

The meat pierogi went alright. We boiled them, then pushed them around in a frying pan while the dessert ones cooked. They fell apart a bit but I was not unhappy to put them in my body.

The strawberry ones were tolerable. Worse than the picture, of course, but in hindsight I'm not worried that the supermarket ladies were laughing to themselves when we bought them.

The potato croquettes were not good. The fact that almost saved them was that we oversalted them. Even so, the taste they had was mostly like the smell of play-doh. They looked like we had boiled a bunch of those tubular packing peanuts. Like slimy rubbery play-doh packing peanuts.

The pan we used to boil the potato croquettes wasn't really as big as it should have been. The water soaked up so much starch that it was about the consistency of sour cream when we poured it out.

Other than that, today was pretty good.