Cabbage Rolls

Early autumn is the best time to pick up fresh, sweet green cabbage. As a result, one of my favourite dishes to make this time of year is cabbage rolls. The combination of the savoury meat filling wrapped in sweet cabbage and covered in zesty tomato sauce somehow makes the chill in the air far more tolerable. But you do have to work for all that yumminess.

Peeling off whole cabbage leaves without ripping them can be a bit tricky and time consuming, but not that difficult if you follow these steps:

1. Core the cabbage - You can do this with a knife making angled cuts carefully around the entire core, or really get creative and use a drill with a clean hole cutter bit. The drill is faster and safer. You don't have to get the core out, just sever it from the leaves so the leaves will release more easily.
2. Clean the cabbage - Remove and dispose of any dirty outer leaves that might have been ripped and soiled.
3. Boil the cabbage whole - Immerse the whole head of cabbage into boiling water and let it boil for at least 5 minutes. As the outer leaves soften you can take the cabbage out (careful not to scald yourself) and carefully peel off the loose leaves (obviously, reserve the peeled leaves). Every layer overlaps another, so just be patient and slow as you work the leaves off. When you reach a layer that is still stuck, returning the head of cabbage back to the boiling water until again the outer layers soften enough to peel off.

Ideally, you want 16 undamaged cabbage leaves to work with (plus a couple of spares just in case you rip one).

While you are boiling the cabbage, prepare the rice as per package instructions. To make it easier on myself, I schedule the preparation of these so that it happens the day after I have a dinner that included rice so I can use the leftovers. You only need a cup of cooked rice, so it's easy to reserve that ahead of time. When making cabbage rolls, some people just use uncooked rice. I find all the grains don't necessarily get thoroughly cooked, but it is an option.

The rice I normally use in cabbage rolls is Basmati rather than regular white rice, but the choice is up to you. If you want to make these gluten-free, you can use quinoa instead of rice. However, as we covered when we were making oatmeal pancakes, the quinoa can be contaminated with gluten from external sources. So, make sure you use products certified by the Gluten-Free Certification Organization (a branch of the Gluten Intolerance Group). Look for the GFCO logo on packaging to ensure they meet the GFCO standards.)

Once you have the leaves ready to go, prepare the filling as per the instructions below. You want to divide the filling into 16 portions; however, if your cabbage was really small, you can use less filling and make more rolls. As long as you can roll the leaves to sufficiently encapsulate the meat, it's ok if there seems to be a lot of filling.

Also, cabbage rolls freeze well, so if you have any leftovers, store them in a dish that can go from freezer to oven or microwave. This way you won't be struggling to remove a brick of frozen cabbage rolls later. Enjoy!