A great big cabbage in the country

You know how Baldrick feels about turnips?* I'm a bit like that about cabbages. I sent the chap out for veg last week, and he came back from the village house that sells home-grown produce with various things including the most beautiful autumn cabbage I've seen in a long long while.

Phwoar.

This cabbage is such a looker that I've been sketching it for days. Never let it be said that I am normal.

But a girl can't get by on pencil fumes alone, so I also decided to turn a majestic cabbage into a majestic, if fiddly, dish: gołąbki.

Gołąbki is the Polish name for Eastern European stuffed cabbage rolls. Literally speaking it means 'little pigeons', 'gołąbek' being the diminutive of 'gołąb', pigeon. Apparently, when my mum was a child she didn't want to eat gołąbki, thinking that they really were made from pigeon. Poor thing.

As with seemingly ever Polish recipe I know, gołąbki are a multi-stage affair. First of all you start preparing a filling, Traditionally it's mince (beef or pork or a mix of both) mixed with cooked rice, but I didn't have any meat so I used mushrooms and rice instead. Fry a nonion, add mush, cook some rice, stir together, season more than you think you need. 

Then you can get on with your cabbage. Take the large outer leaves and pare down the toughest parts of the stemmy bits, and then blanch them.

This is our biggest saucepan, alas.

Then set yourself up a production line to fill and roll each parcel, placing in an oven dish when done.

Now whip up a tomato sauce heavy on the bayleaf and dill, and slosh it onto the pigeons, before bunging them in an oven for a while.

This extremely unappetising shot is of the leftovers the following day, when everything had got a bit ... congealed. Still pretty tasty, though.

It's all been a bit fiddly-food round here recently. Fish cakes on Thursday (leftover mash + tinned cured mackerel + plenty of horseradish + spring nonions + lime juice, breadcrumbed and fried in the oil from the mackerel tin, which will make the house stink but tastes diving) and lasagne today. I think it's something about the weather.

Everyone ready to stir up their Christmas puds this weekend, too?

*For our international readers, I fear this may be a culturally untranslatable reference. Baldrick is a comedy peasant character from 1990s UK TV comedy show Blackadder, with -- in one particular episode -- a preternatural fondness for turnips.