breakinglight11 | Halupki-inspired moosh (Reply)

I made another kind of nice dish out of odds and ends in my kitchen this week. A while ago, my dad’s partner taught me how to make halupkis, a Ukrainian dish made from rolling ground meat in cabbage leaves and slow cooking them in tomato sauce. It’s very tasty, but kind of labor intensive to make, so I don’t do it very often.

This week, I was trying to throw something together substantial without a ton of work, so you wouldn’t think I’d go to a dish like this. But I noticed I had some leftover cabbage, tomato sauce, and grape tomatoes, and some ground turkey meat in the freezer. I didn’t feel up to the wrapping process, but I figured I could throw all that together into something nice. So I diced an onion, defrosted the turkey, and chopped up the cabbage and tomatoes into rough chunks. These I sautéed on the stovetop, then simmered it all in the tomato sauce with a few more seasonings until it gelled into a nice halupki-inspired mix. I served it over egg noodles, and though it wasn’t a very photogenic dish, I thought it came out quite good!

I like cooking this way, tossing together various tasty things and simmering them in a pot. I call them mooshes, and while they’re hardly fancy and certainly not to everyone’s taste, I find them comforting, and enjoy how easy they are to cook.