Let's Make Dumpfnudle!

Here’s your chance to taste something as good as “Grandma’s.” With all of Valya’s cooking and food service experience, you may not want to miss this workshop session. Valya, with the assistance of Caroline Diede (who was born in the same village of Johannestal as Valya), will demonstrate how to make Dumpfknudle from start to finish. She will share her “tricks of the trade” with you. Once finished, you will taste them with an added topping of a little beef and gravy. Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? Class will have to be limited to the first 30 people.

Valya (Valentyna) was born in Johannestal (Ivanovka) Ukraine. Johannestal is about 50 miles from Nikolaev, the city where she lived for over 30 years. When she was 17 years old she went to Nikolaev to live with her grandmother and attended high school. After high school she attended a university in Nikolaev for four years and earned a degree in food service engineering. Valentyna also earned a two year nursing degree from a university in Odessa. She was in the food service industry for about 30 years.

Along the way she found a love of genealogy and archival research. Valya has helped hundreds of people find ancestral documents from many different Ukrainian Archives. Her crowing achievement may have been finding the half brother and sister still living in Ukraine of our GRHS President Valerie Ingram. Valya has one daughter, Karolina, and one grandson, Kevin who still live in Nikolaev. She also has one “best husband,” she says, Milton Kramer and they live in Rapid City.