These are my own recipes, dishes I've come up with, adapted, or cooked so often they've become mine. Some started as a family recipe or an old newspaper clipping and changed over time. Others are just what I make on a weeknight. Each one is written so you can make it in your own kitchen.
Golumpki are Polish stuffed cabbage rolls. They're wonderful, and they take an afternoon: blanching leaves, rolling the filling, tucking everything into a pan. This soup gets the same flavors into one pot. You get beef, rice, and soft cabbage in a tomato broth, and it's ready in about an hour.
Cabbage doesn't get much respect, and that's a shame. Roast it hot enough and the edges go dark and crisp while the middle turns sweet and tender. It's cheap, it keeps for weeks in the fridge, and it's the vegetable everyone seems to be cooking this year.
I have paid restaurant prices for this bowl more times than I want to put in writing.
I ate a version of this at Alma Bea in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a couple of years ago, and I still think about it.
This is the bowl I make in the two months a year when delicata squash exists, and then think about wistfully for the other ten.
I started making this because I wanted the crispy rice bowl I keep ordering out, and then it turned into something else entirely, which is usually how the good ones happen.