Cooking For Joy
This Is a Time for Gobs
Don’t call them whoopie pies
I poured a generous serving of sauvignon blanc into a Mason jar and had a long FaceTime chat with my friend Katelyn the other evening. We both grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania — she’s from Johnstown, and I’m from a small town called Irwin — and we’ve been friends since we worked at the University of Pittsburgh’s student newspaper together in the aughts.
Katelyn covers the Justice Department for CNN and is hunkered down in her D.C. apartment, and I haven’t left my home in Pittsburgh, save for walks in a nearby park, since March 13. We mostly talked about comfort foods from our homeland — and how many of them we could churn out in our own kitchens during a lockdown.
“I bought two cabbages, like any person of Eastern European descent planning on a long stretch of social distancing,” I told her.
Jokes aside, cabbage is not something I normally buy. But I ate a lot of it growing up, not so much at home but in fire halls, church basements, and family restaurants. It’s cheap. It’s substantial. It keeps forever in the crisper. Tossing two cabbages in my cart was a no-brainer on my last trip to the grocery store.
Katelyn and I discussed the feasibility of making pierogi, halushki, halupki, sauerkraut…
