Thursday, October 21, 2010

Week 3: Cabbage Rolls

Okay, THIS post will have plenty of pictures of the food :)

(this picture is of the cabbage rolls before being covered and put in the oven)

Also, I realize that I'm posting three weeks in three consecutive days- sorry if its a post overload! I won't usually post this much, but I kind of fell behind, so now I'm trying to catch up on all my blogging :D


Cabbage rolls are pretty legit. They're basically this meat and rice mixture wrapped in cabbage. It's like the European version of egg rolls haha. This dish is a Polish dish, but there are other European countries that like to make variations of it (I think the Ukraine and Switzerland has their own version of it, too). So far, I've hit up North America, Europe, and Africa. :)

Once again, this recipe was found on allrecipes.com (I really like that website! I'll probably be using it for basically every recipe I try):

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cabbage-Rolls/Detail.aspx

Okay, here's the breakdown:

Rating: 4/5
Cost: less than $25
Difficulty: fairly difficult...
Eat it again?: most definitely!!
Allergies: gluten
Religious folks: It's got pork!! Beware!

I was practically drawn to this dish- I think it was calling out to me. For serious. I usually take about an hour to find a dish I actually want to make, but as soon as I saw the cabbage rolls, I knew it had to happen. I frickin LOVE cabbage (not sure why, it must be my Irish side kicking in), and my boyfriend loves meat and rice. This is like the love child of some of our favorite foods :D

I made a couple changes to this recipe. I didn't use savoy cabbage simply because I couldn't find it at my supermarket (wtf is savoy cabbage??), so I used regular cabbage instead. Also, i didn't want to spend the money on the bay leafs (I expected they might be a little bit costly), so I didn't buy them or use them at all. I used wet toothpicks to keep my rolls together (Katamari did not give me enough confidence in my rolling skills). Note that they were WET, so when I stuck them in the oven they wouldn't frickin burn and stuff. Soak them before you use them :)When I cooked the dish, I definitely had some variation in how I rolled them xD Also, I didn't put the cabbage in the microwave (that seemed strange to me), so I boiled them instead. Now that I look back, putting them in the microwave probably would have been a good idea lol.



Anyway, this recipe was really REALLY good. Like AW SHIT I didn't know I could cook something that tasted good! It was a step above the other two recipes I made, I think. I could be biased because of my unhealthy obsession over cabbage, but whatever this dish ROCKED. The flavors were totally there, the meat was really yummy, and it was just delicious :D If I were to change one thing, I would have probably used the spicy pork sausage instead of regular sausage,
but I'm one for spice. :)

Rolling them up was the real challenge, thus the difficulty of the recipe. I tried doing it the Chinese way first- eggroll style. As you can see on the picture on the left, it didn't look that pretty or that cabbage roll-ey XD I think every Polish person in the world is rolling their eyes at me right now. I can't help it- this is how I was brought up to roll things! So yeah my first couple attempts at rolling up the cabbage rolls were basically giant failures. Derppp.


So then I tried rolling them by placing the meat in the middle, and rolling over three sides, then the last one side over all the three sides and placing a toothpick in the middle. This worked a little bit better and created far prettier results. This is what it looked like before I wrapped them up :)

Basically, the difficulty lied in the wrapping. Also, cooking the cabbage was a little difficult for me- I was really worried I was going to overcook it and make it nasty, but I knew the cabbage had to be soft enough to use as a roll.

I'd say that this recipe was well worth it, though :D It cooked beautifully! I covered it and placed it in the oven, just like the recipe suggested, and cooked it for two hours. It seemed like a long time, but whatever, it turned out :D

If you've got extra time in college to make this recipe, seriously, give it a shot. Make all the stuff, then put it in the oven for two hours and study for your midterms. Also, this recipe makes a TON of servings, so its well worth your money! I'm planning on eating these things for several days... probably weeks lol It's great for a family meal with your housemates :D

Below is a picture of the cabbage rolls- I forgot to take a picture of them fresh out of the oven- I was too excited to eat XD

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