Love at first bite: Tasting perogies put career on new path

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2016 (3653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A couple of months ago, a person rang the bell at Mike Lamb’s winter residence in Arizona.

When he opened the door, a man was standing on the porch, pointing at the personalized licence plate on Lamb’s vehicle, which reads “PEROGIE.”

“You got any?” the fellow asked in a tone of voice normally reserved for transactions more clandestine than ones involving potato-and-cheddar-filled dumplings.

Lamb, the owner of Mr. Perogie, a Winnipeg company that supplies perogies to restaurants and grocery stores throughout Manitoba, as well as Investors Group Field and the MTS Centre, was only too happy to help the guy out. That’s because whenever Lamb heads south to his seasonal home in the Santa Ana Valley, he brings along dozens of bags of frozen perogies, which he doles out free of charge to his fellow famished snowbirds.

“One person told me if I ever figure out a way to open a (Tim Hortons) down there, too, he’d never have to go back to Canada again,” chuckled Lamb a couple of days after Christmas, when he was in Winnipeg for the holidays.

 

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“You’re not going to believe this, but I was almost 40 when I ate my first perogy,” said Lamb, 51, when he was asked how he got involved in the perogy biz.

In 2003, Lamb was living in Eriksdale, an Interlake community situated a few kilometres away from the cattle farm he grew up on. He owned a straw-baling operation at the time. One evening, while working in the vicinity of Warren, he decided to visit his niece, who lived nearby. When Lamb arrived, his niece’s husband was whipping up a batch of perogies for supper.

“You have to try these, they’re the best in the world,” the husband called out from the kitchen.

‘When I took over the company 10 years ago, I didn’t know a thing about perogies. Now, you can ask me anything’

— owner Mike Lamb

“Sure, whatever,” Lamb yelled back.

After cleaning his plate, Lamb asked where the perogies came from. His niece’s husband credited his aunt and uncle, who ran a small catering firm out of their home in Tyndall. They were planning to retire, he continued, and were looking to sell their house, along with their ovens, mixers and century-old dough recipe.

That was when the husband of Lamb’s niece paused, turned to Lamb and said, “You know, you should consider buying it.”

For a couple of years, Lamb and his son Randy, Mr. Perogie’s operations manager, lived and worked in Tyndall while Lamb’s wife remained in Eriksdale. The plan was to build the business slowly, one in-store demonstration at a time, until they could afford to relocate their commissary to Winnipeg. In 2011, they moved into their present-day digs on Elgin Avenue.

“I like where we are because it’s right on the edge of the North End, and we make traditional, North End-style perogies,” said Lamb, who was adopted but discovered a few years ago his birth mother was French-Ukrainian.

“To make a long story short, when I took over the company 10 years ago, I didn’t know a thing about perogies. Now, you can ask me anything.”

In that case, here’s a question: whose brainchild is the MTS Centre’s Jumbo Jets Dog — a fully dressed chili dog topped with bite-size chunks of the Lambs’ perogies? (Since 2014, the downtown arena’s “Local 204 perogy platter” has paired Mr. Perogie perogies with farmer’s sausage from Winkler Meats.)

“They sell a ridiculous number of our perogies — something like 275 dozen per game I’m told — and one day, somebody there had the bright idea to cut one into fours and drizzle it on a dog,” Lamb said. “I gotta tell ya, it’s something else.”

Speaking of brilliant inventions, Lamb recently developed a product he thinks will be the biggest thing to hit varenyky since Hunky Bill. For a bazillion years, perogy connoisseurs have fallen into one of two camps — fried or boiled — when it comes to preparing their favourite dish. Lamb’s goal is to add “microwaved” to the discussion.

“There are a lot of schools and hockey rinks that don’t have a deep fryer or can’t afford a sprinkler system if something goes wrong,” Lamb said.

“So what I’ve come up with is a precooked perogy you can take right out of the freezer, pop into the microwave, and boom — in 60 seconds it’s ready.” (On its website, Edmonton-based Cheemo Perogies advertises a line of frozen perogies that can be readied in a microwave oven, but the cooking instructions recommend immersing them in cold water for 10 minutes beforehand to thaw them out a bit.)

“I had been fooling around with the idea (of microwavable perogies) for about a year — how to make them so the dough would still be flaky, not all soft and smooshey — when one night while I was lying in bed, it hit me,” Lamb went on, smiling and shaking his head no when he was asked if he wanted to let the rest of the world in on his discovery. “I didn’t want to wake my wife up, so there I was at 2 a.m. out in the garage with my deep fryer. By 7 (a.m.), I had it.

“When I did a demonstration for the chefs at (the MTS Centre), they told me I should forget about being Mr. Perogie and sell my recipe to some big conglomerate like Pillsbury instead.”

Before that ever occurs, Lamb has bigger fish, er, perogies to fry.

Not long after taking the reins of Mr. Perogie, he began doing charity work on behalf of the Children’s Hospital. Several years ago, he found out a five-year-old boy he met while fundraising had died of leukemia.

“It didn’t make any sense to me that kids have to suffer through that kind of pain, and I was mad — very, very mad,” Lamb said. “One of my buddies said, ‘Instead of bitching, why don’t you do something about it?’ I was like, ‘Do what? I’m not God.’ “

After getting in touch with the boy’s parents, Lamb learned they had spent time in Ronald McDonald House, a temporary residence for out-of-town families, while they were in Winnipeg attending to their son. Lamb had an “aha moment” and told himself, “There is something I can do.”

Mr. Perogie is now an official food supplier for all five Ronald McDonald Houses in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

“It’s on my dime, 100 per cent, and it’s not something I normally talk about, except that we’re currently working on throwing a huge social this summer, with all proceeds going to Ronald McDonald House. So we want to get the news out there,” Lamb said, adding he hopes to enlist an A-list local rock band to headline the event.

“There will be music, we’ll be raffling off a vintage MG convertible and, of course, there will be a Manitoba meal at midnight featuring Kub bread, kubasa and perogies.”

By the way, if you’re wondering how Lamb’s perogies stack up against your Baba’s, well, we’ll let an elderly woman from Arborg have the final word on that.

“Last summer, I was in the grocery store (in Arborg) handing out samples when this woman who looked like she’d been making perogies for 100 years brushed me off with a ‘Phew,’ ” Lamb said. “I smiled at her and said, ‘Now why would you say that? Don’t you want to at least taste them first?’

“She took her plate to one corner of the store where she kept jabbing (the perogy) with her fork, kind of like a cat playing with a mouse. She finally took a bite, after which she walked back to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Very good.’ “

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca