Stove Top Stuffed Cabbage

I haven’t had them for a very long time. Stuffed cabbage was a staple in our house when we were growing up. My husband is the cook in our house and he has made some wonderful cabbage soup. So we thought we might try making the stuffed cabbage in the frying pan on the stove top rather than the long way of boiling the cabbage to get the leaves, stuffing the leaves with the hamburger and rice, putting a bit of bacon on the top, and then put it all in the oven. I was occupied doing other things while my husband was off concocting this recipe. A bit of hamburger with onions, cut pieces of cabbage, and a lot of white rice. What I didn’t realize was he was using a lot of cabbage near the core - which may be okay in soup, but not for a “casserole” cabbage roll. Then, he added in some turkey lunch meat because there wasn’t a lot of hamburger to begin with. When he served it up it looked okay, but for the first time in forty years, dinner tasted awful. I was embarrassed to tell him, but he can handle the truth. The turkey ruined it, although the cabbage was on the “hard” side - very unlike the real cabbage rolls that are soft and transparent when they are baked. So much for the experiment. That just goes to show you that sometimes you just need to follow the recipe - and don’t add turkey. 

Polonez Polish Restaurant

It’s been a while. Polish restaurants simply do not exist in the DC area. When we first moved to DC thirteen years ago, we found a sort of  Polish restaurant in Baltimore. We grew up on pierogi, stuffed cabbage and kielbasa. Living in Milwaukee also afforded us a few Polish restaurants. But now there is primarily one - that we know of. So we drove over to Polonez in Cudahy for a Polish treat. We had been there several times before. We took my parents there when they would visit us every October all those years ago. So we ordered the Polish platter - kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, potato pancakes, potato salad, and potato pierogi. We also ordered a couple more saurkraut/mushroom pierogi. For whatever reason we didn’t get a cup of chicken soup - something we really needed because both of us are fighting off terrible colds since we arrived in the Midwest. The salad and rolls filled the bill. So it was a treat to eat Polish food. It’s something one needs on a very rainy and cold evening.