So, awhile back Breda stopped over with us on her way to Blogorado, and had enough time and generosity to haul down a cooler full of Irish breakfast goodies as well as a loaf of brown Irish soda bread she’d made for us. She cooked us up breakfast and some bread and butter, we raved and devoured everything, and after she got home her mom* was nice enough to send along a few other recipes from the family tree. I happily noted the presence of an interesting cabbagey looking thing; while America does love its casseroles, sometimes to death, it looked different than anything I’d ever eaten. So I flagged the recipe to try next time around a casserole sounded good and I actually remembered to pull it out of my e-mail, since I tend to flag all other recipes I’m thinking about using either literally with a post-it flag in the book they live in, or in a dedicated Scrapbook folder in my browser.
So, it is most definitely hot-casserole season, and we were buying cabbage anyway to use in one of Stingray’s standards (beer, beef, and cheese soup since you didn’t ask), I gave the recipe a once-over and told Stingray to buy the ingredients on his last run to the grocery store. Here we go, Bredamom Stuffed Cabbage Cassserole:
Stuffed Cabbage Casserole
1 med. head of cabbage (shredded & cooked)
1 jar sauerkraut
Meat Layer
2 lbs ground meat
1 onion chopped
2 cloves of garlic minced
½ c minute rice
Salt & pepper to taste
Sauce
1 can tomato soup
1 can (#2) diced tomatoes
2 small cans tomato sauce
3 tbsp sugar
Layer a 13×9 pan with sauce (just enough to cover the bottom), ½ of cabbage, some sauerkraut, the meat layer, remaining cabbage, sauerkraut, sauce.
Bake covered: 275 for 3 ½ hrs
OR
350 for 1 ½hrs
The ingredients are pretty straightforward; I’d say that I made an executive decision to omit the sugar because I felt the tomato-based components had enough natural sugars not to need sweetening, but the truth is that it’s just one of those things I flat forgot while cooking. I also took a long look at two cloves of garlic per two pounds of meat and was thinking along the lines of “…well, I can’t alter an old family recipe right out the gate, that would be disrespectful…” when Breda added unprompted that we could use more garlic if we wanted. So this is what stuffed cabbage casserole would be if the immigrants in whatever time and location originally comprised it had had an Italian grandmother somewhere along the line. And no access to pasta.
1. Read recipe back-to-front a couple of times. Bug your eyes out. THREE FREAKIN HOUR- ONE AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS? We really should have started about two hours ago if we wanted dinner at dinnertime and were generally as smart as we like to fake sometimes.
2. Stop hyperventilating, clear the surface of dishtowels, mail, and any other detritus. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. (Fahrenheit. Of course. We always double-check these days, we do.)
3. Assemble your vegetative ingredients. The rest of the cabbage from the soup- check. (Instead of one medium head, we got one gigantic head and figured it equaled out to about one medium with the chunk gone that Spouse would take.) An onion- check. Two Five cloves of garlic- check. Give your garlic a good smack with the flat of the cleaver and skin them out of their paper.
4. Might as well get the minute rice out of the way. Pull the box out of the cupboard and consult the instructions on the packaging. Apparently two servings of minute rice is one cup of water and one cup rice, and one serving is half a cup, so it’s a direct ratio. Sling half a cup of water into a small saucepan, turn the burner up, and sling half a cup of the rice into it, as with that thin a layer of water it’s going to start to boil almost immediately. Useful tidbit to know: if you’re only cooking one serving’s worth, Minute Rice really does take just about a minute flat to cook completely once the water boils. Cool! The rice is going into the meat mixture, so haul out a mixing bowl to put the rice in.
5. Mince the garlic. Turns out it really is easier to just suck it up and use the big kitchen knife than it is to haul out and use the weird little widget we bought specifically for the purpose. (It looks like Pac-Man on wheels with a gutful of razors. Really.) Scrape the garlic in on top of the rice.
6. Eye the onion. Eye the food processor. We’re going to be using it anyway to process the cabbage, so why not save ourselves a little chopping work? Come on, we can do it, it’s the holy grail at this point: use the food processor to actually save yourself net time spent with the vegetables. The food processor might gleam slightly at this point, but it’s probably your imagination.
7. Lop the top and bottom off the onion, skin it, and quarter it into sizes suitable to be fed to the food processor with its normal blade attachment. At this point it appears to be a completely normal onion suitable for flavor purposes. Carefully feed the onion pieces into the food processor so that they drop more or less evenly distributed around the bowl. Pulse until the onion has been transformed from chunks into something more like a loosely associated onion gestalt.
8. Open up the food processor and AAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH THAT HURTS OH GOD WHY RUN AWAY
9. Important safety lesson: transforming an onion from quarters into a chunky puree of onion inside a food processor will release every caustic compound that onion has within a confined environment. Do not lean over the food processor as you open it. Optional: it’s too late for Christmas this year, but maybe next year ask Spouse for an eyewash station in the kitchen. Maybe a fume hood too, if we’re feeling flush.
10. Slink back up to the food processor, detach the bowl, and attempt to scrape the onion into the bowl with the rice and garlic while holding it at arm’s length at the same time. Reach whatever compromise your anatomy allows and just get the onion in the mixing bowl. Toss the chopping blade in the sink and thoroughly wash out the bowl of the food processor, since we’re about to use it again for round two.
11. Haul out the grating disc. The recipe calls for “shredded” cabbage, so the grating disc seems like the most logical thing to pick out. Pull out the giraffe-neck doohickey that attaches to the central motor that attaches to the disc. We saw Spouse do this last time, so it should be cake this time, right?
12. It is not cake. Nonetheless, persevere; this time we ARE NOT going to call him in at any point just to deal with a fucking Cuisinart. Not for the third goddamn time. Fiddle with switches and the bizarre design of the giraffe-neck, the disc, and their respective genitalia until you finally find the way to mate the one to the other. Optional: imagine the Legend of Zelda “puzzle solved!” sound effect once you do. I did.
13. Fit the bowl onto the base. Fit the doohickey and its disc onto the motor spindle. Attempt to fit the lid onto the food processor. Try again. Look to see what’s stopping it from locking down. THAT DOESN’T EVEN LOOK LIKE IT WAS DESIGNED TO MOVE EVER OH GOD WHAT. Jam at it in frustration a few times.
14. Oh, the lid locks down in the opposite direction that the bowl locks onto the base, not the same one. Makes sense, really.
15. Start breaking down the cabbage. Abandon your attempts to cut shapes that will easily and in a space-saving way fit in the feed tube; this vegetable is not going to cooperate with your anthropoid ideas of geometry and efficiency. You’re going to be feeding this stuff into the processor awkward fistfuls at a time, jamming it through with the thoughtfully provided jammer like a Japanese subway attendant at rush hour.
16. Repeat some eleventy-jillion times. Notice midway through that the disc you chose isn’t so much producing “shredded’ cabbage the way you imagined as it is “bits” of cabbage and that the slicing disc would probably have been a much better choice, given the way the surface areas of the cabbage would have worked out. Of course halfway is the ideal time to have this revelation; no choice now but to proceed with your cabbage confetti. Pause a few times to unload masses of confetti into the largest mixing bowl you own; that really was a very large head of cabbage, and Spouse turned out not to need much.
17. Address the meat. There’s two pounds of it. You know, somewhere in between that little factoid and the entire head of cabbage mandated, you’d think it might have occurred to you that you are one half of a childless married couple and not, say, a family of eight- and halved the damn recipe at some point. We need to make a mix of what’s already in the bowl and the meat, and putting the meat on top fills the bowl to threatening to overflow.
18. There’s really only one solution to this problem; we need to get in there and give that meat and those vegetables a deep-tissue, really personal massage. By the time you’re through you’re going to be up to your wrists in raw meat and the meat will be more-or-less mixed- you’re probably going to need to massage it more as you apply the meat layer later. Wash your hands. Really, really thoroughly.
19. Remember belatedly you were supposed to mix in the salt and pepper too. Cry. Go back and do it. Wash your hands again.
20. Ransack the cabinet for the tomato soup, diced tomatoes, and tomato sauce, all of which just sort of appear in the average American cupboard regardless of deliberate purchase. Canned tomato products may well be an unstudied migratory species. Nocturnal travel? From where?
21. Mix together the various canned products until they become more or less unitarily saucelike to the eye.
22. OH MY FUCKING BLEEDING GOD IT’S WHAT TIME AND I HAVEN’T EVEN GOT IN THE OVEN YET?
23. Haul out your biggest casserole dish. Look at your giant bowl of cabbage and your not giant enough bowl of meat stuff and your giant pan of sauce. Twitch slightly. Family of six, maybe. Family of eight, no way.
Layer a 13×9 pan with sauce (just enough to cover the bottom), ½ of cabbage, some sauerkraut, the meat layer, remaining cabbage, sauerkraut, sauce.
24. Put down a healthy layer of sauce. Put down a layer of roughly one half of your cabbage. Eye the level already reached in the pan with concern. Extract a jar of sauerkraut from the cupboard and layer down what turns out to be roughly half of that, too. Take out your meat and give it another intimate massage remixing it in the process of layering it. (There will be roughly one hamburger’s worth left.) Wash your hands again.
25. Layer down the next cabbage and sauerkraut as best you can. You’re going to have too much cabbage, but oddly enough that giant jar of sauerkraut will wind up mostly spent. Trepiditiously brush on some of the sauce- we don’t want spillover in the oven. Carefully slide it into the oven. Optional: while you are blogging later, realize you forgot to cover it with tinfoil. Oh well, I’m sure the… tomato sauced cabbage will brown nicely and… fuck.
26. Just before you consider eating your pets, it will be ready and you can pull the bubbling concoction out of the oven to serve. Grab a big serving spoon, because it’s very brothy. Get a generous slice, because you ain’t making too big a dent in this tonight, and nom.
Now, Breda had told me that the thing to serve this with was mashed potatoes, which I got some sort of an Irish-stereotype chuckle out of to myself about how potatoes didn’t have to be served with every meal. Later I realized (after she told Stingray outright mid-bake) that it’s because it really needs a starchy side of SOME kind that’s relatively neutral in flavor to absorb the broth, the way French bread is often used. I arranged some Saltines around the plate as broth-absorbers just to have the contrast.
As it turned out, that was a really good idea, because it tastes surprisingly different with a starchy background than strictly on its own. Just on its own, the tartness of the sauerkraut is rather overwhelming; not a BAD taste, but certainly a strong one. With the starchy “shock absorber” the flavor mellows and blends a lot better. Given that we have so much in the way of leftovers to work with, I think at some point when I have time this week I’m going to do what Breda told me to do in the first place and whip up some mashed potatoes to serve it over. After that, I’ll decide if I want to back significantly off the sauerkraut (I DID use nearly a whole damn jar) or keep it as-is when making in the future. I also want to see what happens when I don’t forget the sugar. Either way hearty portions disappeared.
Oh, and being uncovered didn’t hurt it that I could perceive. Thankfully. Wonder how it’d be with some parmesan sprinkled over the sauce on top, as long as I’m giving in to Italian ancestors I don’t even have…
*Who has a first name like regular people- it’s Ellen- but because we are eight years old, we constantly refer to her solely as “Breda’s mom” or just “the Bredamom” anyway. We also refer to the slow-cooker pulled pork recipe she gave the world as “Bredapork”. We don’t know why her name becomes an adjective so easily, but it does.**
**Yes, yes, my footnotes will actually be hyperlinked next time. I’m just kinda frazzled and not up to absorbing HTML way beyond my usual level right this moment. I’ll probably be lazy and install a plugin before next time.
