Stuffed Cabbage Roll

Today I woke up at 5AM in the morning to make a special dish for my mom’s birthday: Stuffed Cabbage Roll🥬 I specifically chose this dish because it reminded me of one of my mom’s cooking back in the Philippines. She would make some hearty meatballs with cabbage and tomato soup and this brings back those memories. This recipe seems easy to do and not to mention the difficulty level is set on Easy. Let’s do this 👩🏻‍🍳

Just looking at the ingredients, the dish looks Italian and this is actually the first time I’m going to use ground lamb. I didn’t even know such thing exist at a regular grocery store 😯

First thing to do is to cook the the tomato sauce 🍅 Man this sauce is so messy, it boils like lava and gets all over the place 😓 While I was at it, I started boiling water on a large pot for my cabbage and I trimmed the cabbage.

By the time the tomato sauce was cooked, I set it aside and cooked the cabbage in the boiling water. Once the cabbage was cooked, I drained it and cooled it off with cold water.

Afterwards I gently peeled off 10 leaved, chopped the remaining cabbage and placed it on the baking dish.

Now it’s time to prepare the stuffing 🤗 First step is to cook the onion and garlic until they softened.

Then assemble the ingredients 👩🏻‍🍳 I’m super excited to use the ground lamb!

Since the rice is still cold from the fridge (cooked it last night) and the garlic onion is still a little warm, I decided to mix it first to balance the temperature. When that’s all mixed, I added in the spices and lastly the ground lamb. Afterwards I divided the stuffing into 10 pieces.

Finally the assembly! My workstation is all set up 😊

For each piece, I trimmed off the hard part of the cabbage leaf before wrapping a meatball in it. Once I got all the cabbage rolls ready, I poured the tomato sauce on top covering every inch of the cabbage rolls.

Then into the oven 🔥

After an hour wait, I pulled it out of the oven to let it cool. It kind of looks the same except the color is darker.

And thus, the ✨Stuffed Cabbage Roll 🥬  ✨ is COMPLETE!

So how does it taste? It’s pretty good 😃 It’s different from my mom’s cabbage and tomato meatballs soup or my boyfriend’s stuff cabbage (yeah, he knows how to cook it). Both my mom and boyfriend’s dishes are mostly wet and has similar taste, whereas this one is very much like lasagna. Speaking of which, adding parmesan or mozzarella cheese would be the cherry on top! But I think the biggest highlight of this dish is the lamb 💕 Now that is one ingredient that I didn’t expect the recipe would use.

All-in-all, it was a good dish! My mom, sisters and dad loved it although they said it is a bit heavy because of the rice. Not to mention the ever so huge portions again 😅 Aside from the cheese, I think adding a bit of nutmeg on the stuffing would enhance the flavor. Other than that, it’s a pretty good dish!