Cooking is a creative outlet for me, and after a week of unemployment I was itching to stretch my muscles a bit. I’ve made two disastrous pots of stuffed grape leaves, but had never tried cabbage rolls. I decided to wing it. Here’s the recipe, a combination of what I did and what I wish I’d done:

Ingredients

For the Filling:
cooked rice (made with olive oil and a vegan bouillon cube)
roasted cauliflower (break the florets into very tiny pieces and toss with olive oil, salt & pepper, roast on a cookie sheet at 400 for about 15 minutes, checking and turning periodically)
roughly chopped fresh parsley
finely shredded kale
some leftover peas you have in the fridge (optional)
dash cumin
dash cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground sage
1/2 tsp paprika

For the Sauce:
olive oil
onion, diced
2 cloves garlic
3 cans of diced tomatoes
salt & pepper

For the Cabbage Leaf Wrappers
~6 large cabbage leaves washed and cut in half, with the center rib removed–makes 12 wrappers

This is a beast of a multi-pot recipe, so if you already have cooked rice and/or roasted cauliflower on hand, use that instead. If not, start there. Put the rice on to boil and the cauliflower in to roast while you start on the sauce.

For the sauce, sautee the onions in olive oil until they begin to get soft, about 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic, salt and pepper, and allow to cook for another minute or so before adding the tomatoes, one can at a time. Cook on medium for about 5 minutes and then turn down to a simmer while you work on the filling.

For the filing, combine cooked rice, shredded kale, chopped parsley, roasted cauliflower, and whatever else you feel like tossing in (we added some leftover peas). Mix it all together and then add the herbs, mix some more.

Nuke the cabbage leaves for about 3-4 minutes, until they’re tender and flexible so they’ll wrap around the filling without cracking.

At this point, I wish I’d blended the tomato sauce in the food processor, so if you’re feeling extra ambitious, go ahead and pulse the sauce a few times in the processor.

Now for the fun part! Put a couple dollops of sauce in the bottom of a baking dish and then make little cabbage packets by putting a healthy spoonful of filling into the center of a cabbage leaf and folding closed. On most, I wasn’t able to get them totally sealed on all sides, so they ended up looking more like cabbage burritos with one end open, but still turned out just as good. Place your cabbage packets side by side on top of the sauce dollops in the baking dish, jamming them in pretty tightly. Once you’re done, cover the whole mess with the rest of the sauce and bake at 400 for about 20-30 minutes, or until you get tired of waiting and are ready to eat already.