Cabbage rolls are the kind of food that doesn’t have an official recipe. And I’ll stand by that! Every family has their own version of cabbage rolls, because every family likes something a little bit different.

For example, my cabbage rolls are vegetarian. (Gasp!) My Russian Mennonite ancestors just rolled over in their graves. 😉 But my parents raised me vegetarian, so my dad made his without meat. And they were delicious! Mine are like his, but different because I have allergies now that I didn’t have before. So we tweak them for our family’s taste.

It all starts with boiled a head of cabbage.

You boil until the leaves come off the cabbage head, and aren’t too soft, because you need to use the leaves to wrap up your filling.

The filling is a mix of things you like! Some people do ground beef with rice and spices, and a very few others, like me, do a vegetarian mix.

My filling uses:

• rice
• spinach
• blended chick peas
• garlic
• diced onion
• salt
• oil
• paprika
• lemon juice (just as dash)

Then you wrap a large spoonful of filling in a boiled cabbage leaf, and put it in a pan. You put tomato sauce on top, and bake the life out of it for about 1.5 hours. I also add a layer of cabbage leaves on top, just to make sure that the actual cabbage rolls stay moist and don’t burn.

And there you go!

Cabbage rolls!

My family loves them, and since we can’t have my parents over to eat because of Covid, I made these so that I could bring them some cabbage rolls, too. They are a lot of work, so they’re a treat.

So, for those of you who have cabbage rolls in their family repertoire, what do you use in your filling? Cabbage roll filling tells so much about a family! 🙂

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