cabbage rolls

Food, homemade wine, love and lots of laughter.

These are the key elements of every family gathering I can recall.  Always so much food! Too much food if you ask me, but that never stops any of us from over eating!  We all have our favourites. Mine was never cabbage rolls…..but I think that is because I never actually tried one until I was in my late twenties. 

Why on earth did I wait so long?   

They are glorious! 

I made a batch for the first time awhile ago, they are incredibly easy and they turned out great! I will be making these again!

As far as cooking times - you know your oven, use your judgement. I think I did an hour, covered at around 350. I also made extra to freeze so putting in a batch frozen you'd be a good hour and a half at400 and I would uncover mine for the last half.  

Same with amounts....use your judgment - I like to cook a whole lot of something and then freeze it so most of my recipes are triple or quadruple the amount a normal batch would require.

I like to be creative with recipes so I change them up all the time, and make do with what is in my pantry. Here is a light overview of what I did.

Ingredients:

Tomato sauce – I used earthpure organic tomato sauce

Ground pork - I used lean free range ground pork from Spragg’s Meat Shop

Head of cabbage

White or yellow onion

Fresh dill

Bacon

Rice  - I cooked mine but you can also put uncooked rice in which will then expand and keep your cabbage rolls nice and tight.

Get the rice going, I like basmati but minute rice would be fine too.

While the rice is cooking, boil the cabbage and separate the leaves. I am not really sure if there is a certain technique but I just threw the whole head into my huge soup pot and boiled and peeled and boiled and peeled.

 

While that is going on fry the pork with onion, dill and bacon until cooked, add the tomato sauce and mix.  Add the rice to the mixture.

Once everything is cooked and the cabbage has cooled enough to handle without burning yourself, spoon the mixture onto the cabbage leaves and roll!  

Put rolls into a 9x13, lay a few strips of bacon on top and pour some tomato sauce over and bake. If you are making extra to freeze, I would just lay the bacon on top and leave the tomato sauce until you were half way through re-heating them in the oven.