This is How We Roll

If you are one of our loyal readers you are probably aware that Justin and I are not huge fans of cabbage.  Despite us both having connections to Pittsburgh, our familiarity with polish food was pretty limited to a restaurant in Santa Monica.

But the last remaining item from our share was the head of cabbage.  And since we still have some homemade sauerkraut and kimchi in the fridge, we decided to actually use the cabbage as the star in our show for dinner tonight.  We scoured the internet for recipes, and stumbled across this guy for stuffed cabbage rolls.

You'll want to start off by coring your cabbage, and then placing it into a pot of boiling water to cook the leaves.  As they start to pull away from the head, carefully remove them, keeping the leaves whole.  Any smaller leaves that you can't pull off whole, can be placed into the bottom of your baking dish.

At the same time, saute the onions and celery in a pan with some butter.  We chose to include the celery leaves for some additional celery flavor since they looked so good.  Once they've cooked down, and are soft, place them in a bowl to cool.  We were growing hungry, and impatient, so we stuck ours in the fridge for a few minutes.

Once the celery/onion mixture has cooled, add an egg, the pork and beef..  You really just want to make sure that the onions and celery aren't piping hot.  Otherwise you'll get scrambled eggs and it will start to cook your meat.  The recipe just calls for seasoning of salt and pepper, but we put our own spin on things and also added some paprika, roasted garlic salt in place of plain Kosher, and some red pepper flake.  Toss that around so everything is good and mixed.

Then you start stuffin'!  Spoon some of the meat mixture into each cabbage leaf.  The size of the leaves will determine how much meat you can stuff it with.  Then you just roll it up like a burrito, so all sides are tucked under.  Place the rolls, seam side down, into your baking dish.  If you need to create a second layer of rolls, that's fine.

Every 30 minutes, you'll want to baste your rolls with the juices that have leached out.  At this time, if the rolls on the 2nd layer are a little charred, you can swap places with rolls that are on the bottom.


When your rolls are just about done baking, you can start on the sauce.  The grocery store didn't have any good looking cremini mushrooms, so we went with some portabellas.  Start by chopping them into smaller pieces, and cooking them down in some butter.  After a few minutes, add the garlic.  Once the garlic has turned a golden brown, add your beef stock, cooking sherry (since the wine was at my place), and the juices that have leached out from the cabbage rolls.  For seasoning, we added some fennel seed, thyme, roasted garlic salt and pepper.

As the sauce came together, we added a little cornstarch to thicken it up.  Once your sauce tastes good, and is the right viscosity, you're ready to serve!

These things are delicious! Even if you aren't big fan of cabbage give them a try.  They are relatively healthy to boot and there is just enough butter and pork to make them yummy!

Holy Cannoli!

We'll keep this one short and sweet.  Short, since I can link to past posts for the dinner portion, and sweet since we made cannolis!

We got another spaghetti squash from the CSA last week, and we have some leftover meatballs from a past dinner, so that's what we threw together tonight.  Here's our spaghetti squash and meatball how-to.  We did have to make some sauce, so we made a puttanesca-esque sauce.  Sweat out some onions and garlic, add baby bellas and anchovies (these were in oil with capers), toss in a can of tomatoes (preferably San Marzanos), and top with some chopped basil and parsley.  Since we had some parmesan rinds hanging out in the fridge, we threw one in to help thicken the sauce, and add a little cheesyness.  Then you can just let it simmer until you're ready to serve.  Super quick.  Super simple. Super tasty!

Now for the cannolis!  We had some leftover ricotta from our gnocchi, so what better way to use it up than by making dessert?  Honestly, I'm not much of a baker.  I don't have the patience to precisely measure each ingredient, and sift things.  Plus, I tend to gravitate towards salty snacks over sweets.  I prefer the creativity of cooking, where I can add a splash of this and a dash of that until it tastes right.  I leave the baking to my mom.

They took a little more time and work than we thought, but we pushed through!  While Justin manned the sauce, I prepped the cannolis.  For the dough, all you need is flour, salt, sugar, an egg, and some dry white wine.  The only white wine I had was some delicious chocolate flavored wine I'd picked up a couple years ago at the Virginia Wine Festival (If you've never gone, you should definitely check it out!).  We thought it'd add a nice subtle chocolate flavor to the shells.

Once the dough was wrapped up and in the fridge to rest, I moved onto the filling.  I let the ricotta drain for a bit, and then added powdered sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg (since I didn't have allspice), grapefruit zest (since we didn't have a lemon) and some whipped cream (you just need soft peaks when you're whipping the cream).  This sat in the fridge to set up while we ate our sketti squash and meatballs.

Once we were through with dinner, it was time to make cannolis!  Not to be confused with this guy.  We floured the counter and rolled out our dough while the oil heated up.  Its best to get the dough really thin.  We used the bottom of a bowl as our stencil, and cut out circles of dough.  Each circle was wrapped around a little wooden dowel that we found and dropped into the hot oil.  It only took a minute or two for them to fry up, but we got into a groove and knocked out the shells. 

Since we had some extra mint in the fridge, we chopped some up and added it to the filling for a little fresh, brightness.  I made my own pastry bag by dumping the filling into a big ziploc bag and cutting off one of the corners.  This will let you easily pipe the filling into the shells.  Once they had cooled down and were easy to handle, each shell was filled with the ricotta mixture.

During one of our last trips to Trader Joe's, we were roaming the aisles and came across a spice grinder that contained sugar, coffe and chocolate.  We looked at each other, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing we had to get it.  And what better use for it than to top our cannolis?  We ground some into a little dish and dipped each end of the cannoli into the delicious powder.

It really tied in the chocolate wine that was in the shells, and brought out the cinnamon and nutmeg that were mixed into the filling.  Ok...so maybe this post wasn't as short as I thought it would be, but it certainly was sweet!