March 30, 2015 | 0 Comments

Maggie Monday: Cabbage Rolls

Below Maggie talks about safer kraut. No one in my family, except for me likes it so when I buy a jar, it lasts a long, long time. See what Maggie does with it below…

Every New Year’s Day, for as long as I can remember, my mom made a massive pan of Cabbage Rolls. As she says, “Enough to feed Cooley’s Army”. I have no idea what that means.

Both of my parents are of German heritage. We had a lot of smoked sausage growing up. But thankfully, Sauer Kraut was only served once a year. While I am not a huge fan, when it is covered with tomato sauce and brown sugar, and baked up until the sauce is caramelized, it can be rather tasty. There it ends, though!

My mom still bakes these up in a massive old-fashioned coated steel roasting pan- hers is black with white and gray speckles. She triples the recipe below, and just slapped them in the oven on January 1 and cooked them all day. By dinner the house smelled great.

She always served these over homemade mashed potatoes.

So that is what I do as well. Don’t mess with greatness.

Cabbage Rolls

Meat Stuffing:

1 lb of hamburger

1 small onion, minced

½ cup instant rice

1 egg

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp oregano

½ cup bread crumbs

Wrap and Sauce

1 head green cabbage

1 small bag of sauer kraut

1 can tomato sauce

¾ cup brown sugar

What you do:

Set tomato sauce, brown sugar, cabbage and kraut aside. Mix all remaining ingredients in a bowl. Once well blended, make into meatballs- whatever size you prefer. I used about ¼ cup or so. Set meatballs aside.

Remove cabbage leaves in tact. Boil cabbage leaves enough to get pliable, then individually wrap around each meat ball.

Place a layer of sauer kraut in the bottom of a baking dish. Place the wrapped meatballs on top of kraut. Layer more kraut on top of meatballs, then pour tomato sauce on top.