Good old Cabbage Rolls

This dish is definitely from my mothers cooking repertoire. I missed the taste of it, so I decided to give it a try. It gives a little work though, but I suppose the more you do it the easier it becomes. We always had it with boiled potatoes and splash of sour cream.

Cabbage Rolls

1 medium size cabbage
300g ground beef
1 small onion finely chopped
1/2 cup long grain rice
pepper
salt

Boil the rice.
Mix the beef, chopped onion, rice, salt and pepper.
Place the whole cabbage in the pot with water and little bit of salt, making sure that water covers cabbage entirely. Bring it to boil 5 - 10 min, so the cabbage leaves become slightly soft and you can bend them without braking. Do not over boil the cabbage otherwise the greener and softer parts of the leaves get mushy. Lift the cabbage out of the pot and remove whole leaves one by one. Cut the white tough skeleton end of the leaf thinner.

Flatten the leaf on the board, depending of the leaf size, place 1-3 Tlsp of meat mix onto the leaf. Fold the sides of the leaf to the centre over the filling and then roll the filling into the leaf starting from the white skeleton end.Place the rolls on the pan with little bit of olive oil and fry them 3-4 min from both sides until they gain brown spots. Remove from the pan and place them to a pot layer by layer tightly side by side. Pour over with the remaining water from boiling the whole cabbage. Cover with a lid. bring to boil over low light and let it simmer 1 hour.