Cabbage Rolls, Anyone?

Cabbage Rolls, Anyone?

Since retiring, I'm finding time to just go crazy doing the things I love to do, like playing music, improving my writing, reading the newspaper and drinking 3 cups of coffee in the morning, and sometimes getting with friends to cook together. I had this idea the other day about making cabbage rolls, and stocking the freezer with packages of those babies for quick and delicious meals, to be ready for the table with just an addition of some mushroom or tomato sauce. But which ones to make? I got out my ethnic recipe books, looking in the Eastern European and Middle East sections. Sure enough, there were plenty of recipes. All of them started with the basics--rice, beef, pork, onions, the cabbage. Meg came over for the afternoon and we chose 3 different recipes to make, the ones we thought would be the most different. There was Bosnian--with bread crumbs, oregano, tarragon and cream, Polish--with mushrooms, and Hungarian--rich with paprika, chopped celery, and diced smoked ham. We cooked up the rice, browned the 6 pounds of meat, sautéed up the 4 #s of onions, added the garlic, and divided the ingredients evenly into three huge massive. In the meantime, we cored the cabbage and steamed it to loosen the leaves.

Now we started adding the distinguishing spices and other ingredients to the three batches. The eggs went in, the bread crumbs, the salt, the salt, the paprika, some red pepper, cream, chopped mushrooms, and so on. We started tasting and adding this and that. The Hungarian was a cinch to make. With the ham addition, and the paprika and red pepper, it was easily full of flavor. More oregano that we thought, finally made the Bosnian batch good, but the Polish one was lacking oomph. Looking through the spice drawers, we came up with nutmeg as an addition. It's always good in homemade mushroom soup, so why not. Bingo. That was it.

One cabbage only made it through one batch. We had chosen to make the Polish ones first. When finished we had 50 of those on the tray. Out to the freezer in the pole barn to freeze before bagging. But we only had one more cabbage. We chose to use the Hungarian mixture with those leaves. Now we patched out 4 of the Bosnian rolls with the remaining few leaves, and put those in the baking dish, along with 4 of each of the Polish, and Hungarian rolls, covered those with tomato sauce, and put those in the oven for dinner. The rest of the Bosnian mixture would make great filling for stuffed peppers, so it went into smaller freezer bags to have for just such an occasion.

Do you have a great cabbage roll recipe? Did you have them at your wedding reception? Do you follow your gramma's recipe exactly or did she do it by guess and by gosh too? Are there other regions in the world that make cabbage rolls?

Maybe my next "make it get-together" will be stuffed dumplings. That ought to cover every cuisine in the world.