Life's a Stitch

Thank you for the positive thoughts and the comments on the comfort food. Some of you guessed correctly – they are Golabki, the cabbage rolls of my half Polish heritage. I might have thrown you off because when I have more stuffing than cabbage, I make the rest into meatballs and cook them all together. The recipe is at the end of the post.

Really, they aren't as finicky as they sound:

• You don't have to stick to the recipe – the sauce is fine substituting tomato sauce for the soup, broth and tomato juice. Just make sure you add the catsup.
• Alternatively, you can cook them in a roasting pan covered with foil.
• Skip the rolling altogether – assemble it lasagna style, using cabbage leaves like you would the noodles.

Mother's Day was quiet here. Bryant, now 19, legal in BC has given into the tattoo urge. I've written about his possible design choices in the past. He chose an illustration by Clement Hurd, from Margaret Wise Brown's Runaway Bunny, the book we read together when he was little. We used to turn it into a game. I accept that this tattoo is the closest thing to "Mom" he could have chosen, not that I would have encouraged any of them. At least it's hidden below his armpit.Oh the things our kids do, eh?

Here's that recipe:

Li’s Cabbage Rolls

 Cabbage:

1 large
green cabbage – Cut with sharp knife around the core. You don’t need to remove
the core, just score it deep into the cabbage. Fill a deep pan a quarter full
with water. Place cabbage in water, cover, and heat until boiling. Reduce heat
to simmer and remove leaves as they become tender enough to remove. I usually
take off 2 or 3 at a time and simmer, covered, some more. Cut tough spine from
each leaf.

 Rice: Cook 1
cup dry brown rice. Cool.

 Stuffing:

Cooked
rice (above)

1½ lbs
ground meat (I use a mixture of two of the following: turkey, chicken, pork and
beef. Believe it or not, a child in my son’s class did a science fair project
on the leanness of ground meat and found pork the most lean).

½ finely
chopped onion

2 cloves
crushed garlic

¼ C
Worcestershire sauce

1 t
celery salt or mixture of salt and celery seed

½ t
pepper

¼ C
catsup

 Sauce:

1 C beef
broth 

1 can
undiluted tomato soup

1 C
tomato juice or sauce

½ C
catsup

1½ t
dried dill

 Procedure:

Mix all
sauce ingredients together. Cover bottom of Dutch oven with a coating of sauce.

Mix all
stuffing ingredients. For each cabbage roll I use one large leaf, a medium leaf
and a half or two small leafs. Lay out the leaf and put enough filling to fill
the centre, while leaving enough on the sides to overlap the mixture. Cover the
mixture with the top and bottom of the leaf and then the sides and place seam
side down in the pot. When the first layer of rolls covers the bottom of the
pot, pour on more of the sauce. Continue with the rest of the rolls and finish
with the remaining sauce. If I have leftover stuffing I make them into
meatballs and cook along with the cabbage rolls. Cover and bake at 375 degrees
for 75 minutes.