cook: stuffed cabbage

Patrick had brought home cabbage he had harvested. I thought it was Savoy. It’s not. He corrected me and said it was Napa. No matter. I used it for Ina Garten’s recipe for cabbage rolls. I trimmed the leaves one by one and then plunged a few at a time in boiling water for a couple minutes, long enough to soften the cabbage and make them pliable enough to wrap around a filling.

For the filling, I combined ground beef, chopped onion, bread crumbs, uncooked long grain rice, fresh thyme leaves, salt and pepper. I shaped the stuffing into fat little sausages and wrapped them, burrito-style in the limp cabbage.

I love that beautiful vibrant green of the parboiled cabbage, but next the sauce. I already had marinara in the fridge, which Patrick accidentally opened even though there was an already opened jar. No matter, I told him I would use it in another dish. I added to my preserved tomato sauce from last summer's heirlooms, brown sugar and red wine vinegar. I ladled the sauce at the bottom of the baking dish and atop the stuffed cabbage rolls.

The cabbage rolls I knew I could store in the refrigerator for later in the week when I go to the gym in the later afternoon and don't come home until early evening when it's too late to cook anything from scratch and could just call Patrick to pop the rolls into oven while I work out.

Good man. Dutiful husband. He popped the cabbage rolls covered in aluminum foil in a 350 degree oven for an hour, and I had come home in time after swimming laps, to prep some roast vegetables.

We quite liked the cabbage prepared this new way. 

But in the future, when I make this dish, I'm going to precook the rice just a little as it didn't soften enough in the juices of the cabbage and sauce because it was bit too al dente.