On a Roll

Being at home means having a spacious, well-stocked kitchen to work with. While I don't think that Keizo's apartment is lacking anything essential, we certainly don't have one of these:

Neither of us had actually used a slow cooker before, but it seemed like a fun thing to experiment with. We looked through an ancient cookbook of my mom's and settled on a recipe for cabbage rolls to serve to my friend Teri and my parents.

We got started assembling the rolls right after our late breakfast, since the recipe said they needed 7-9 hours to cook. While Keizo prepared the filling; ground beef, cooked rice, onion etc, I did my best to remove the outer leaves from a head of cabbage without shredding them into pieces. Some came out better than others, but we were able to use all of them without much difficulty. Next, the cabbage leaves got a nice hot bath in boiling water for 3 minutes.

Each of the 12 leaves got a 1/4 cup of filling and then I rolled them up and stacked them inside the crock pot.

Then I covered them with a mixture of tomato juice seasoned with Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper etc, put the lid on and turned it on low heat and let it sit.

As the dinner hour approached, I made a green salad and garlic toast (a dinner staple.)

Our meal:

The rolls were tasty, although next time I think I would add some more seasonings and maybe some garlic to the mix/sauce. I think it would also be interesting to try making them with tofu and maybe some minced roasted vegetables. Oddly the leftovers we ate for lunch the next day tasted even better, as if 8 hours stewing in a pot wasn't long enough for all the flavors to meld. A delicious culinary mystery.