One Big Cabbage

The offending cabbage in the kitchen. The cast iron dutch oven to the right of it is a 4Q one, so you can tell how massive the thing was.

I was given a huge cabbage a couple of weeks ago. Lou walked in with it, bigger than his head, I scrambled for a camera but it was too heavy for him to hold it comfortably, so missed the shot. We finally used it last night, did cabbage rolls. The recipe is in a lot of different cookbooks, Moosewood, MtAoFC2, Molto Italiano. I loosely followed the Molto Italiano version. It took alot of time, we ate at about 9. It felt like some of Julie's posts in her Julie/Julia blog, a really long slog in the kitchen, with good, but not great results. I really liked the leftover boiled cabbage leaves, sweet and tender and tasty. Made 2 fillings. The potato/ricotta/sausage one was good, but needed more potato and ricotta. Potato and cabbage seems like a natural pairing, probably read about it in Dr. Zhivago or something, but it seemed like all of the recipes I read involved alot of meat. The other one was a buffalo meatball type of mixture. But I didn't have enough buffalo so bulked it up with egg and poha (pressed rice). Not too exciting. More meat and/or more aggresive seasoning would have helped.

Stuffed Cabbage Leaves recipe:

discard the first few outer leaves of a cabbage.
make filling(s)
saute garlic in a stove top/oven safe dish (le crueset)
add red sauce, warm
remove, rinse 14 leaves
put in boiling water, in batches, for about 8 min.
put in cold water
cut off the thick, lower part of the stem, about 4"
lay out flat
put a dollop of stuffing on, and roll up, burrito-style
put in the baking dish, add some wine
375 1hr covered
That whole process took 4 hours.

The kitchen mess after the dish went in the oven.

The final result.