June 12th, 2010 Yes, it’s been quite a while since we’ve posted anything. We’ve been busy:
1. Starting a new business.
2. Raising over 300 plants from seed for the garden (in our tiny little kitchen).
3. Successfully rehabilitating a Little Brown Bat (in our bedroom).
4. Watching an Eastern Phoebe couple raise their chicks right outside our back door.
5. And enjoying our new puppy (who still is not sleeping through the night)!
Not to mention the weeding, planting, spring cleaning, etc. No wonder we’re tired!
March 28th, 2010 Thanks to St. Patrick’s Day, large fresh heads of cabbage are plentiful and very inexpensive. That calls for a big batch of Hungarian Stuffed Cabbage!
Since both BarBBQ Bill and I are Hungarian, we grew up eating “Töltött Káposzta”. This is one of our main “comfort foods”.
Here’s the ingredients:
1 head green cabbage (large)
2-3 lbs. meatloaf mix (pork, veal and beef) or all ground beef (I used ground venison with a little ground pork for this batch)
1 cup uncooked white rice
1 – 2 eggs
1/4 cup bread crumbs
Fresh parsley, chopped (I ran out so I used dried parsley)
1 – 2 onions, diced (I used 1 really large sweet onion)
3 – 6 cloves garlic, minced
2 – 3 14 oz. cans sauerkraut
2 – 3 46 oz. cans tomato juice or vegetable juice
Lots of paprika (I use two kinds – sweet and a half-sharp)
Cover the 1 cup rice with boiling water and let stand (about 10-15 minutes) until the water is absorbed. Set aside to cool. If it’s still a bit wet, just drain the excess water off. It shouldn’t be cooked all the way.
In a large pot (the one you’re going to cook the cabbage rolls in), saute the onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent, not brown. Add paprika to taste, being careful not to let the paprika burn (it will get very bitter). This is a big head of cabbage, so I’m using my largest stock pot (I think it’s 16 quarts?) for cooking.
In large bowl, mix ground meat, 1 egg, cooked rice, most of the cooked onion mixture, parsley and some of the bread crumbs.
Mush it around with your hand to mix thoroughly. Season with salt and more paprika. Add another egg and more bread crumbs if necessary. It should be moist enough to hold together into balls of filling.
With a sharp, sturdy knife, carefully cut out the cabbage core…
and bring large pot of water to simmering. Add whole cabbage head and cook until you can start to peel the outer leaves off without tearing. Keep returning the cabbage to the pot, peeling off the outer leaves until they get too small or too crinkly to roll.
Trim the rib off each cabbage leaf with a sharp paring knife (this makes it easier to roll).
Place a spoonful of ground meat stuffing on base of cabbage leaf and roll once.
Remember the stuffing will expand slightly when the rice absorbs the liquid, so don’t roll too tightly.
Turn in one half of the leaf (I do the left side first) and roll up.
Tuck in the other side of the cabbage leaf with your forefinger to secure the roll. If the leaf is really wide and there’s too much cabbage to tuck in, just trim part of it off and add the trimmings to the pot.
They should look like little packets that will (usually) stay intact during the cooking process.
In the large pot that you sauteed the onions in (I left a few in there to flavor the sauce), add about an inch or two of tomato juice and a layer of sauerkraut. Start adding the cabbage rolls.
When you get a layer finished, season with more paprika if desired (I don’t add more salt, because the tomato juice and sauerkraut contain a lot of salt). Pour tomato juice over to cover. I used two quarts of home canned tomatoes instead of one of the cans of tomato juice.
Continue layering sauerkraut and cabbage rolls until you run out of cabbage rolls. Chop or sliver whatever cabbage you have left and use in layers in the pot. Make golf ball sized balls with any leftover filling, and add those to the pot as well.
Cook over very low heat until sauce starts to bubble around the edges – maybe three to four hours. Be careful when you stir so you don’t start tearing the cabbage rolls, and watch that you don’t scorch the bottom layer. This works well in a large crock pot, too.
I usually turn off the heat and let the pot cool. Then gently heat the whole pot back up again to serve. This cooling and reheating seems to really blend the flavors together. After that, you can scoop some out into a baking dish or ovenproof saucepan, and reheat in the oven. This prevents scorching.
Stuffed cabbage is much better after it’s reheated, and it freezes well. For freezing, I take some of rolls and sauce out before it’s totally cooked. To serve, thaw and heat thoroughly to finish the cooking.
Add a dollop of sour cream when serving (if you like) or a side of kielbasa (I don’t like it cooked in with the cabbage – BarBBQ Bill does, so we compromise and have it on the side. You can certainly cook it in there if you wish.)
This was my mother’s (and grandmother’s) recipe. Today would have been my Mom’s 86th birthday-every time I make this, I think of her. Hard to believe she passed away 25 years ago this month. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.
March 19th, 2010 The Can Jam ingredient for March was Alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, and such). Another tough choice. What could I possibly make?
For some reason, I started thinking about the local hot dog stand we used to go to when I was a kid and the onion relish they served. I found a recipe that sounded pretty close to what I remember and…it can be canned!
Sweet Onion Relish (Small Batch) from vidaliaonion.org
6 cups ground Vidalia onions (no Vidalias here yet, so I had to use sweet onions from another continent 
1/8 cup canning salt
1 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup sugar (original recipe called for 1-1/8 cups, but I didn’t want it that sweet)
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon pickling spice
1/4 teaspoon mustard seed
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
1/8 teaspoon powdered mustard
Grind (or use food processor) onions, add salt and let stand 30 minutes. Squeeze juice from mixture and discard juice.
Add vinegar, sugar, and spices. (If you prefer, wrap the spices in cheesecloth and remove bag before packing into jars.) Bring to a boil and cook for 30 minutes, stirring often.
Pack both onions and enough cooking liquid to cover in sterilized jars, leaving 1/2″ headspace. Remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rims. Adjust lids. Process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath. Makes about 4 half-pints.
Olfactory memories are interesting. The taste and smell of the relish cooking transported me back in time…to sitting in the back seat of our 1950-something DeSoto and having the carhop bring out our order, hooking a tray over the driver’s window. Then you had to turn your headlights on to let them know you were finished. What a neat blast from the past.
February 20th, 2010 I’ve decided I much prefer to make bread the old fashioned way so, in cleaning off my kitchen shelves, I pulled out a hardly-ever-used (but somewhat dusty) copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes. It really needs a new home.
This is the first book – not the new “healthy bread” one. And in the interest of full disclosure…
one page did feel the effects of me accidentally misting it with water.
If you’d love to give this great book a home, leave a comment on this post by midnight EST Friday, February 26. And the winner is…
Gretchen. Congratulations and enjoy the book.
February 15th, 2010 I shoulda known goats would pick something like…
Carrots for the February Can Jam ingredient.
I promised BarBBQ Bill that I would not stray (too far) from our personal canning resolution of “If we won’t eat it, we’re not going to waste the ingredients or the time to put it up.”
The majority of carrot recipes I found that could be put up using a boiling water bath (one of the Can Jam rules) were jams (carrot cake jam? We don’t like carrot cake, so I doubt we’d eat jam that tastes like it) or pickles (already have too many jars of pickles in the pantry).
One thing I haven’t made in a while (and that we both enjoy) are fruit butters. I found a Carrot-Apple Butter recipe in Linda Ziedrich’s book, The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves with these ingredients:
and promptly modified the recipe to use up some cranberries I had (another resolution – use up what’s in the freezer by summer).
I decided to make a small batch of Carrot Cranapple Butter:
I simmered the carrots in cranberry juice until almost tender. Added the cranberries and simmered until the cranberries started to pop. I added a cinnamon stick for a wee bit of spice.
Once the carrots were tender, I added the sliced apples, and cooked until everything was soft.
I removed the cinnamon stick and pureed everything in the food processor first. Then I ran it through a food mill with the medium screen in place.
After the food milling process, I dumped the puree into the crock pot and added the sugar a 1/4 cup at a time, tasting along the way. After cooking it about an hour, I wasn’t happy with the texture, so I dumped the puree into a blender and whizzed it until the tiny bits of carrots disappeared and got “buttery”.
After another 1/2 hour, the butter thickened nicely. I stirred in the vanilla (I used vanilla bean paste instead of vanilla extract) and added another dash of cranberry juice – just ’cause I thought it needed it.
After ladling the butter into the jars (1/4″ headspace BTW), I actually remembered to get most of the air bubbles out before I sealed them (a chopstick works great) and processed the jars for 10 minutes in the BWB.
From this batch, I got one 1/2 pint jar and two 1/4 pints. I’m sure I would have gotten another 1/4 pint if I hadn’t lost a lot in the back-and-forth transfers from the food processor to the food mill to the blender and some tasting!
The butter was a wonderful complement for these Cranapple Carrot Muffins that we had as our Valentine’s Day breakfast:
Mix the apples and sugar together in a large mixing bowl. Add the cranberries, carrots and nuts. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Mix well to moisten the dry ingredients. Lightly beat the egg. Stir the egg and the applesauce into the apple mixture.
Fill 12 greased muffin tins about 2/3 full and bake at 375°F for 20 minutes.
As a reward for reading this very long post, I’m giving away a copy of Linda Ziedrich’s Jams and Jellies book. Leave a comment on this post by midnight EST, Friday, February 26 to be entered in the drawing. And the winner is…
Congratulations, Jenny!
Photo “Hungry Goat” ©iStock/Rhonda Lewis
