galumpkis pie

Before I tell you about the dish that inspired the dinner diary project, let me back up and tell you more about my cooking background.  After moving out of the dorms in college, I decided I wanted to learn to cook.  I mean, I knew how to do this more or less, but having lived at home and later in the dorms, I had never been fully responsible for my meals.  So I got started with family recipes (which, being from Minnesota, means they probably involved a lot of condensed soup) and boxed meals like Hamburger Helper.  In the period of time between graduating from college and attending graduate school, I also decided that I wanted to learn to bake.  Convinced that I would never have time to do either of these things as a graduate student (oh how wrong I was about that), I decided that that was the time to learn to cook and bake.  

When I got to grad school, I graduated from cooking with condensed soup and Hamburger Helper to cooking with real food- meaning, not processed.  I went to the farmer's market for the first time.  One of the first recipe source I used was Simply Recipes.  I planned my meals and grocery shopped once a week.  Have you ever gone to the grocery store and seen someone walking through the aisles with a list, checking off items and wondered what sort of people do that?  Well, people like me, that's who.  I continued to bake, plying my friends with cookies and cupcakes.

When Drew and I started dating, we began cooking together almost immediately.  The first meal he made me was an old family favorite: spaghetti and veggie meatballs.  I wish I could say that the first meal I made for him was something that also had great meaning, but I can't.  I think I had a recipe for lasagna rolls with gorgonzola cream sauce (courtesy of Rachael Ray) that I wanted to try, so I made that.  And while we've made veggie meatballs many times since, I can't say the same for Rachael's lasagna rolls.  Sorry Rachael, in case you're reading this.  You're probably not.  

Drew and I continue to share cooking and meal planning responsibilities.  We usually make a main dish and a side dish for each meal (usually the side is less cumbersome than the main one), and we cook 2 or 3 times a week, eating leftovers on the days we don't cook.  Sometimes meal ideas come easily; I might come across recipes while reading food magazines or blogs.  Other times, we each select a meal, so as to not burden one person with all the meal planning.  Eating a variety of good, quality food is important to us, which is why we both cook- it is very, very rare that only one of us cooks any entire dinner for the both of us.  In four years, I can't even count on one hand how many times this has happened.  And even though we keep an emergency box of chicken nuggets and bag of frozen ravioli in the freezer, we steer clear of processed foods.          

The dish that launched this project is Galumpkis Pie, from A Year of Pies by Ashley English, her fifth cookbook.  Her other cookbooks are about canning and preserving, dairy, bees, and chickens, and blogs over at Small Measure.  While I have never looked at her books on keeping chickens or bees, as I have no use or desire for doing either, I have perused her books on canning and dairy.  I checked out A Year of Pies from the Newport Beach Public Library, and immediately fell in love- the text and pictures are captivating, but the recipes- a mix of sweet and savory- are interesting and creative.  

I had never heard of Galumpkis Pie, which is an adaptation of a Polish dish, but I was intrigued.  The dish was easy to make and came together easily.  The bottom layer is a pie crust, and the rest consists of alternate layers of boiled cabbage and a ground beef-tomato filling (we substituted veggie crumbles).  At first, I thought it would be a pain, but it was not.  After rolling out the crust, I let it rest in the refrigerator while I prepared the filling and while the cabbage was cooking.

Advance planning really helped with this dish and made it so easy to make.  The filling contains cooked rice, which I made a few days earlier.  And the pie crust was already prepared too; I made a double crust a few weeks earlier for a quiche and popped half of it in the freezer for a later use.

Usually our dinner rotation contains dishes from a limited number of cuisines- Italian, American, Mexican, and Asian- so this dish was a welcome break from our usual routine.  The filling was really interesting- the cloves, a surprising addition, turned out to be a pleasant one, and one that mellowed over time.

I think Drew made carrots to go with this, but I can't remember how he seasoned them.

I also don't have a picture because I didn't know this would inspire the Dinner Diary project.