Filled and filling.

The filled boiled wheat paste food item is a pan-cultural phenomenon; the Chinese have their wontons, the Italians have their tortellini and ravioli and Eastern Europeans have vareniki, which I attempted to make on Sunday for a Russian-themed party:



Those which you see are not the ones I made. They are supposed to look like that. The skill with these and wontons is getting the pastry rolled out thin enough without it tearing. Also I was very impatient and didn't let the filling cool, which melted holes in the pastry and caused some to burst whilst cooking. I had to improve their taste and appearance by shallow frying them once they had been cooked.It was a not uncommon and good call.

I filled mine with chopped cooked sweetened apple. I did a few savoury ones filled with mushroom. The beauty with these is you can fill them with almost anything (edible).

I also made a very good bubble and squeak a few weeks ago. Here it is:



As I recall, it had onion, red cabbage, beetroot, white cabbage and an orange-fleshed sweet potato which I microwaved (tut tut) for speed. There were also some vegetarian sausages which were mainly potato, cheese and small pieces of vegetable. Fried it all in butter. Shame you can't see the lovely crusty burnt bits.