Sarmale!!!
I like making a “lazy” version. Cut up 1/4 of a head of cabbage into 1"/3cm square pieces. Brown 1lbs/445g of ground beef (mix half pork and beef for a nice mix). Add cabbage and saute with salt, pepper, and onion powder until cabbage is slightly wilted. Add 1/2 cup of precooked cold rice (any style. I like calrose, but for a low carb alternative use crumbled hard tofu), and 1/4 cup precooked bacon (from costco) and 1 small can/445ml of tomato juice (heinz is best) and simmer for 15 minutes. Add a giant squeeze/2-3tbsp of ketchup and mix. Serve!
Thank too for sharing your recipe. The ketchup in the end would be really good. That’s like a cabbage roll casserole.
Instead of cutting up cabbage, you can also buy coleslaw mix from the grocery store (if you’re extra lazy). It’s cabbage and carrots in a bag. The ketchup would make that so tasty too.
Stuffed cabbage is a widely underappreciated food.
Agreed! And not hard to make.
I love cabbage rolls!
I’m already farting in anticipation.
Recipe kindly requested…
What was the hardest part? What was easier than you thought? Anything you can do to prepare the night before? Can it be held in the refrigerator before cooking?
I’m kind of coming up with a template for some straightforward pieces of information that a cooking community might enjoy sparking into a conversation.
This looks delicious.
My recipe is simple. Hardest part is touching a hot cabbage and waiting for it to cool. I’m impatient.
Take a whole cabbage. Wash it. Put it onto a pot of water and boil it for about 10 minutes. Then take the cabbage out of the water and let it cool. Keep the water you boiled the cabbage in.
(Alternatively you can freeze the cabbage in the freezer to make it soft. I prefer boiling.)
For the meat, I add 1/2 cup uncooked rice, salt, pepper, and season it how you like (parsley or onion or italian seasoning for example). Mix it.
The cooled cabbage: cut the root part to separate the leaves. For each leaf, you know that thick vein in the center? Trim it down thinner to make it easier to roll.
Stuff the cabbage with the meat and roll it up.
In a pot or pan, put tomatoes on the bottom. Fresh or a can of crushed tomatoes work. Put the cabbage rolls you made on top of the tomatoes. Then add the cabbage water to cover the rolls. Optional: Add more tomatoes on top, fresh or canned, whatever you want.
Alternatively, put tomatoes on the bottom, then cabbage rolls, then fill it with tomato juice.
Any left over cabbage- I just put mine on top whole (or cut in half), for both weight and because I love boiled cabbage.
Cover it up. Boil it on the stove. I cook mine for 45 minutes. The meat cooks. The rice absorbs juice.
And done!
Ever tried half and half beef and hot Italian sausage? It’s an amazing twist
Not yet but I’ll have to! Sounds so good.
And is this stuffed tomatoes I see on the side? And I thought I had a nice dinner.
Yes it is! :)
I got the best cabbage rolls the other day… from Chinese immigrants with a Thai / Ukrainian restaurant. Not a fusion, just both kinds of foods, true to their origins. The pierogies were excellent to.
This is a go-to camping dish for me. Very nice on a cold night by a campfire
Sarme???
