poorhouse pie, a recipe

When most of my bills are a month over due, my husband has developed a tubercular quality cough and we can't afford his asthma medication* or flea medicine for the animals or new pants for the kid it feels a little Irish around here.

 

It puts me in the mood for cabbage. It makes me want to get earthy and reminds me that the answer to all my problems comes from the same source I did and if I embrace this experience and stop fighting it I will find something soul satisfying in it. Perhaps I'm feeling philosophical because I know that some significant relief will be on its way by the end of the month (in the form of a first pay check from my new job). But I think there's more to it.

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

 

Enough calzone dough for 8 calzones

 

1.5 lbs of cabbage, shredded or diced big

1.5 lbs of button (or any other) mushrooms, sliced

1 yellow onion, diced

2 tbsp olive oil (or butter if you prefer)

2 tsp salt

many grinds of pepper

1 tbsp dried marjoram

 

8 tbsp stone ground mustard

8 ounces feta cheese (or other cheese of your choice)

 

Method:

 

Preheat oven to 425 degrees

 

In a large saute pan heat up the olive oil on med/high heat; then add the onion and cook until it begins to sweat. Add the mushrooms and cook for about five minutes. Add the cabbage, salt, pepper, and marjoram. Cook until the cabbage is cooked all the way through. About ten minutes.

 

Cut your dough into 8 pieces. Roll each one out and on one half of it spread out a table spoon of the mustard. Add the cheese on top of the mustard. Then heap about a half a cup of the cabbage mushroom mixture on top of the cheese. Now pull the other half of the dough over the filing and seal the edges of the dough together. You may need to slightly wet the edges of the dough to make it stick well. Take the edges and tuck them up so that the filling won't ooze out during cooking. Place on a baking sheet and proceed the same way to fill the rest.

 

Sprinkle some cornmeal on the baking sheet if you have some handy. It helps to keep the dough from sticking. Cook the pies for ten minutes (if you use a pita dough like I did, if not, cook for as long as your calzone dough recipe calls for).

 

 

*If it weren't for credit cards it would have been Angela's Ashes for us a long time ago. Philip is waiting to get free asthma supplies from the companies that make them. If you're poor enough they'll sometimes give them out.

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Uploaded on November 7, 2008
Taken on November 6, 2008