Anticipation ...

My daughter called today.

Have you been to the produce aisle at Wal-Mart? she asked. Brandon said they have basketball-sized cabbages!

She got my attention.

In my native New England each fall, huge boxes of "ginormous" cabbages can be found at every marketplace; it's our family's autumn ritual to launch the cold weather season with a Polish favorite: golumpki (stuffed cabbage). Our best cabbages come from Atkin's in Hadley, Massachusetts. Everything at Atkins is good. But I digress.

As the season arrives, we begin our quest to seek out the largest, freshest cabbages we can find. We steam the leaves, create a filling of ground beef, rice, onions and spices, and steam the finished cabbage rolls for hours in a tomato'ey sauce also made from scratch, never making less than 50-60 per batch. these are not piddly little golumpkis; these are, as one friend affectionately calls them, "golumpki bricks." Golumpkis of substance. Not for the meek or mild appetite.

The creation of said golumpki is a family dynamic; workstations are created around the kitchen. Meat must be prepared, and rice, and the sauce. Leaves peeled and steamed. Everything blended, using every pot and bowl in the house in the process. Then, one by one in assembly-line fashion, each softened cabbage leaf is laid out, trimmed, stuffed with a large spoonful of filling, rolled, folded, tucked, carefully placed in the roaster three or four layers deep, and covered with sauce. Three hours later we feast. And it is astonishing how many of these ethnic delicacies our horde of teenagers can consume.

To our dismay, this fall in our part of Middle Tennessee there was not an Autumn cabbage to found, at least not one that was golumpki-worthy. Very distressing, since my October-born eldest granddaughter's biggest birthday wish was a plateful of our homemade stuffed cabbage. How many young ladies can you think of who request golumpki for their 22nd birthday?

Scouring every single store, market, farm stand and back yard garden in our community yielded not a single worthy cabbage; three weeks after her birthday we gave up. Large autumn cabbages rival large yellow turnips for scarcity in Middle Tennessee. Yellow turnips should be considerably larger than baseballs, and they are, everywhere else. But I digress.

Today came a secondhand report of large cabbages at Wal-Mart (the finder's fee, by the way, is a plate of the finished product) and by morning my daughter will be there to grab two or three -- maybe more -- if they exist. I hope we are not disappointed; wintry weather on tap in the next few days creates the perfect opportunity to "go into production" in the kitchen and churn out this beloved meal. And freeze the extras, if there are any.

Running on hope, I can already feel the leaves in my fingers, smell the spices, taste that first mouthful...

What's that Carly Simon song?

"Anticipation..."