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Mosaic may still be months away, but preparations for the festival were already underway Saturday inside St. Anthony’s Parish Hall, where nearly 100 volunteers gathered to make thousands of homemade pierogies.
The volunteers were part of Regina’s Polish community, working assembly-line style to prepare food for the cultural festival weekend in June.
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Organizers said about 4,000 pierogies were expected to be made during Saturday morning’s session alone, with another 4,000 planned for a second gathering later this month.
“This is a wonderful community program that gets everybody together,” said Mary Ann Langshaw, vice-president of the Polish Canadian Cultural Club.
“As you can see, people are talking and chatting. It’s a way for our community to spend time together and share part of our heritage by making pierogies.”
Langshaw said she has been making pierogies for roughly 50 years, part of a long-running tradition that combines food preparation with community building.
The process starts long before anyone begins pinching.
Volunteers cook and prepare batches of pierogies in the kitchen at St. Anthony’s Parish Hall as part of the Polish community’s preparations for Mosaic. (Jacob Bamhour/980 CJME)
Volunteers arrive early to prepare the ingredients: boiling potatoes, mixing dough and setting up stations before the rest of the group begins assembling the pierogies.
Langshaw said the filling is made from potatoes, cheddar cheese, Cheese Whiz, onions, garlic, salt and pepper. The dough is then rolled flat before being cut into small discs.
Each disc is filled with a ball of the potato mixture, folded in half, pinched closed, and then boiled, buttered, and frozen, or served fresh.
“We hope that by one o’clock we will have anywhere around three to four thousand pierogies made today,” Langshaw said.
Volunteers prepare potato filling for pierogies at St. Anthony’s Parish Hall in Regina as part of preparations for the Mosaic Festival. Nearly 100 volunteers gathered to help make thousands of homemade pierogies. (Jacob Bamhour/980 CJME)
For Michael Sliva, a Mosaic ambassador who has also been involved in the community as a dancer and volunteer, the event represents weeks of preparation behind the scenes.
“We’ve got just about 100 folks here making pierogies in anticipation of Mosaic,” Sliva said.
“We should be making about 4,000 pierogies today, and then we’ll be back on March 28 to do another 4,000.”
Sliva said the process is carefully organized, with volunteers handling everything from dough preparation and potato filling to the final pinching and packaging.
Nearly 100 volunteers gather inside St. Anthony’s Parish Hall in Regina to pinch and assemble thousands of pierogies ahead of the Mosaic Festival. (Jacob Bamhour/980 CJME)
“It’s a huge assembly line,” he said. “From dough prep, potato prep and logistics to the tables where people are pinching and bagging the pierogies.”
He added that the work reflects the community’s pride in doing everything by hand.
“There’s a lot of pride in the room that we make the pierogies ourselves,” Sliva said. “Everything’s done from scratch, and everything’s done by volunteers.”
That final step, sealing the pierogies properly, is also one of the most important.
Volunteer Martin Fidler, who also helps teach dance in the community, said each pierogi needs to be pinched carefully so it doesn’t break open while cooking.
“You go around at least five times to make sure things are not going to leak out,” Fidler said with a laugh.
“Otherwise somebody’s going to come by and say, ‘Hey, we noticed you’ve got some leaky pierogies.’”
If the dough splits during boiling, the filling spills out into the water, forcing volunteers to dump the pot and start again.
For the volunteers, though, the effort is worth it.
Sliva said thousands of hours of work go into making Mosaic possible each year, but the result is something the community takes pride in sharing.
“It’s all done by volunteers, people that love being part of this community and love being able to represent their culture,” he said.
By the time Mosaic arrives this summer, those thousands of handmade pierogies will be ready to serve, helping bring the community together for one of Regina’s biggest cultural celebrations.
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Volunteer rolls pierogi dough on a floured table while others prepare fillings during Mosaic preparations in Regina. (Jacob Bamhour/980 CJME)
