Culinary Adventures: Manti and Pierogis

Here's another one that doesn't exactly involve a recipe, per se, but I'm counting it as one of my two "recipes" for the month of March. On occasion, I visit a Russian grocery and buy dumplings, pierogis, and "Riga style" sour cream, which I'm pretty sure is just sour cream. Anyway, I normally boil the dumplings and pierogis, which works well enough. However, I tried my hand at lamb manti, and they ended up retaining a lot of fluid, which made them sort of messy. They also didn't quite agree with me. I looked at the actual instructions on the next package, and it claimed that I'm supposed to be steaming them. Steaming them? How am I supposed to do that?

Well, the thing is, I actually have an Oster rice cooker. I hadn't paid much attention to the steaming tray that comes with it, but as it turns out, it's as stupid easy to steam manti and pierogis in a rice cooker's steaming tray as it is to cook rice in a rice cooker - though I'll note that the steaming is a touch more messy than cooking rice. I've done it twice now, and I think I'm going to be making more trips to that Russian grocery to keep my freezer properly stocked.

I've also got some packages of gnocchi that I got from a nearby Italian grocery. As fate would have it, some dude on YouTube has suggestions for cooking gnocchi in the rice cooker, too, so I may give that a try as well. More to come on that topic!