Staycation Meal #10

 

Here we have an central European-style feast! Mashed potatoes, peas and carrots (my own recipe), and stuffed cabbage rolls (recipe from The Cheeky Chickpea).

I've wanted to make cabbage rolls for ages. Not the Asian-style ones I showed you a little while ago, but the Polish kind. I was intimidated by the prospect of separating leaves of green cabbage, but given that I'd taken a few weeks off from work, it was definitely time to take the plunge! For me, this turned out to be anticlimactic, because either I had a remarkably cooperative cabbage, or I possess unique cabbage-leaf-separating talents.

I didn't actually have to cook the cabbage at all to separate the leaves. I just cut the bottom off and scored along the base of the leaf to separate them one by one. The first few leaves popped off on their own (not just the outer leaves, either, which I'd taken off before I started this process). The others separated when I slid them around the cabbage, rotating both leaf and head in opposite directions.

So, mildly shocked, I popped these separated leaves into boiling water instead of a whole head, and since I was only making a half recipe, I had an in-tact little head of cabbage to pop back in the fridge for some other use. I boiled the leaves for about 5-6 minutes and set them aside while I did other things.

The rest of this was pretty easy. I'd cooked rice the night before to add to the mix, and I used some Beyond Beef ground rather than Impossible, which turned out fine. The most challenging thing was the leaf-separation, but as that process went so smoothly, this was one of the easiest meals I've ever made. I just rolled everything up and baked the rolls in the sauce for the requisite 2 hours and 45 minutes, then let them sit for 15 minutes before serving.

I think I spent more time chopping carrots, honestly!

And they were delicious! Such a wonderful flavor! I have never tried the vegan ground before. It's expensive stuff--at least, in vegan dollars it is, I guess, because it's only about $1 more per pound at my store than ground beef would be. But as I never buy meat, I am comparing such things to beans and tofu, which is not a fair comparison. I'm now wondering what other things I can recreate from my earlier life.

It's definitely a winter recipe, requiring the oven to be on for hours on end, and one you'd make on a day you were going to be at home for a while to babysit it. But on a day like the day I made this, all of that was absolutely perfect.

Happy New Year!