Bulgarian Stuff cabbage rolls.

You will always find stuffed cabbage rolls at many dinner parties as the Christmas holiday arrives.  Made from freshly home pickled cabbage at the end of summer.  Add in the pickled juice to give an extra sourness kick, you will be coming back for more.  This recipe is very flexible with the ingredients, and can be stuffed with either grape leaves and or peppers to give it extra color.  In this one, we added some red peppers for colors. Work with what you got on hand. You can't go wrong. So lets get started with the ingredients.



 

1 pickled cabbage                      500g of ground pork
1 cup of uncooked rice             5-6 peppers (fresh or dried)
1 onion                                        2 cups of pickle cabbage juice (pink liquid)
1 cup of water                             spices:  salt, black pepper, chili powder, oil





First chopped up the onion and saute on moderate heat until soften. Since we had some dried peppers on hand, soaked the peppers in water on low/medium heat.





Add in the ground pork next and cook until brown.  Add the spices and the uncooked rice at the end.





Turn off the heat and leave on the stove to help allow the rice to soften up a bit and soak in the flavors.





Stuff the cabbage by adding the filling in the middle of the inner side close to the stem and folding the rest of the leaf over the filling to keep it all together.  You don't want to over stuff it.





Here is the peppers getting filled up.





Once finished rolling them, add some leftover cabbage to the bottom of the pot so that the rolled ones does not get stuck to the pot during cooking. Stack them, seam down, onto the pot and top off with any leftover cabbage.













Here we added a small porcelain plate ontop to help keep the rolls from movement and falling apart during cooking.  And add 2 cups of the pickled juice and 1 cup of water.  Let it cook on the stove till the juices all but evaporated.





Here is the finished product.








I hope you've enjoyed a bit of Bulgarian cuisine.