It's exciting to be Polish.

And, if you are me, it is exciting to stuff food items with other food items. This combination of exciting things obviously dictates a golobki feast! Golobki is stuffed cabbage rolls. It is Polish food. It is good. There are gazillions of different stuffed cabbage rolls from all over the world, but this is the one my mom occasionally made me when i was growing up.

i would like to add some unsolicited advice here about regional foods, connecting with your ancestry, and advanced chefery in general. it's complicated so bear with me.

salt your effing food, people.

My family has a "traditional" Polish feast every year on Christmas eve. It is called Wigilia. If it were to be your first Polish food experience, you may never go back for seconds because for some reason, my family hates salt. Luckily, similar to your common "kids table" at Thanksgiving, the 707 Nelsons and Team Martinola created a "salt lovers table". and that is how i know that Polish food is actually quite tasty.

Back to Golobki. it is cabbage stuffed with rice, ground beef and pork, and baked in a tomato/beef broth. it sounds so unbelievably bland, right? it is not.

so i have two Polish cookbooks that were Ma's. one has a picture of Golobki on the cover and the recipe mom used. The other has no golobki recipe but it does have at least 7 recipes for various meat items suspended in gelatin. why do i not throw the pickled herring infested book away?


First! Boil some water. salt it. cut out the core of a head of cabbage and plop it into the boiling water.

in a matter of minutes, the outer leaves will start to seperate from the head. remove them and place them on a paper towel to drain and cool.

Normally, your meat mixture would be a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground pork, a cup of cooked white rice, and one sauteed onion. but i am from Mill Valley so my mixture is this: One zucchini, grated, 1 cup of minced mushroom, 1 cup of brown uncooked rice (why waste time cooking rice that you are going to cook again? is that the root of all of those Polish jokes?) and i also added 3 minced garlic cloves to the last 30 seconds of my onion saute. AND SALT.

your cabbage leaves should be cool by now. if the rib is so thick on your leaf that it can't lie flat, take a pairing knike and shave off some of the rib. lie your cabbage leaf flat and fill with enough filling that you can just make a little burrito out of it. obviously, the outer leaves will hold more filling than the inner.

here they are all lined up, waiting for the next step.
butter! the recipe calls for 3 Tbsp of butter to saute the rolls in, but i used half butter have olive oil because i am also Italian. saute seam side down til slightly brown and flip to do the same to the other side. this really makes each little love loaf its own little secure entity. it gives the golobki the confidence to stand up to the rest of the cooking process.
place in baking dish seam side down. poor beef broth to almost cover the rolls. you will need a lot because the rice will soak it up. Get a whole box of broth and plan on using the whole thing. on the side, take 1/2 Cup of beef broth and mix with 4 ounces of tomato paste. blop that mixture over the top of the rolls. cover with tin foil and bake at 325 for as long as you can without burning your dinner. i would say an hour, at least. but the longer everything hangs out together, the better it will taste.
ugly on the outside.
ugly on the inside, too.
but delicious all around. I know that it may seem weird to you to not actually use any beef meat but still use beef broth. i don't like beef. but i do like beef broth. i wish someone would make a french dip sandwich with turkey meat, but still give me the beef juice to dip it in. anyways, it is healthier, easy, and yumtastic so if you want to live a life as exciting as mine, give this recipe a try.

don't forget to salt.

i am making a Moroccan inspired chicken stew tonight. if you are lucky, i will forget to take pictures.