Warning: Never Ever Make Cabbage Rolls!
This post was written with the intention of becoming a life long promise/oath plus a stern reminder to never, ever, EVER attempt to make cabbage rolls or -malfoof mahshi- again for as long as I live. Period.
Why? You are asking why? Imagine me answering you while grabbing tufts of hair in both hands and screeching the following: it was a lovely, lazy, quite Friday night. I was ready to settle on my couch and turn on my DVD to watch Lethal Weapon 3. I grew up with that movie, now I’m rewatching all four films on Blue Ray in a childhood movie reminiscing weekend marathon. Dreams of my being lost in my delicious coffee and a movie they don’t make alike anymore all faded because my nagging husband started to, well, nag once more. This time his new “project” was for us to attempt cooking “mahshi” which is a collection of vegetables stuffed with rice and other vegetables and cooked for hours on the stove, only he wants us, and by us he means me while he sips his tea in front of the TV, to try and make him cabbage rolls with quinoa instead of rice and sweet potatoes instead of the usual boring old potatoes, “trying to be healthy” was his motto.
Then I decided why the couch potato attitude of mine? Let me spend a fun hour in the kitchen, me and my music, dancing and cooking, no? After all, I did know how to cook vine leaves, right?
WRONG!
Abandoning all hope for a relaxing evening, I began researching the quinoa-rice substitution in the mahshi dish online. Apparently you simply replace the amount of dry rice with the amount of dry quinoa and cook it away like nothing have changed so I did just that. I prepared the mix above, substituting raisins with fresh pomegranate seeds as I cannot stand raisins. Preparing the stuffing took about half an hour and felt like five minutes because I was singing away with my happy members of my iTunes library on my iPhone.
To wrap the cabbage into rolls, all recipes called for pre-boiling the cabbage head for five to ten minutes so the “cabbage leaves” would become a bit tender thus easy to roll. I cut the bloody thing in half, submerged it for a few minutes in boiling water, took it out, let it cool for a bit, and then apparently attempted the impossible: prying away the cabbage leaves! If you try and slowly tear away one leaf, the entire thing comes apart. If you somehow manage to free a leaf without that much damage, the now-free leaf is so delicate and will disintegrate between your now-shaky and quite confused fingers. I tried, and tried, and layered sheets of broken cabbage leaves on top of each other in a failed attempt to contain the “healthy quinoa” filling only to end up with balls of cabbage layers with quinoa grains peeking happily through. The two hours I spent, oblivious to my surroundings, cursing and muttering and trying to roll those wretched cabbage leaves, can only be described as a catastrophe.
As I layered the mishapen rolls in the cooking pots and topped the entire thing with sweet potato slices, I felt that my back had broken in two! I also had a nice heap of torn cabbage leaves on my cutting board, looking at me accusingly. Oh my! Now I know why people only sell vine laves and never rolled cabbages! Who would waste their time trying to roll those crazy things? They are impossible to make! Now I understand why whenever my mother cooked mahshi she would have two onions, a dozen cabbage rolls, and mostly stuffed courgettes and vine leaves, leaving us to fight over the the cabbage rolls and wondering why we couldn’t only cook a potful of them only!and we would fight over the cabbage rolls!
I cursed myself, and the cabbages, and whomever invented cabbage rolling in the first place. Perhaps it was meant as a torture practise in the old ages? What the hell I was doing? Why wash’t I out and about enjoying a night out in a nice restaurant? Why wasn’t I at the couch, watching Mel Gibson and Danny Glover cracking jokes while running after bad guys? And I still had to clean up the kitchen which smelled like cabbages and wait another two long smelly hours for the pot of mangled cabbage rolls to finish cooking on the stove!
Needless to say I was dreading the result of my “adventure” as the timer went off in the kitchen but I had to admit that when I turned over the pot -and found that the plate I had used to keep the cabbage rolls in place as they cooked was singed beyond repair, how lovely!- the cabbage leaves didn’t look that bad. So they are not as uniform or elegant looking as other people with magical powers and super human patience would usually prepare, but they didn’t look that weird or revolting.
Well, they might look revolting if you’ve never seen mahshi or eaten stuffed cabbage before. I myself wouldn’t touch cabbages but I adore and crave stuffed cabbage, mahshi style, all the time. The fact that they are not as slimy as stuffed vine leaves is a bonus.
The cabbage rolls weren’t all presentable, some were cracking apart in places shamelessly displaying their quinoa stuffing, but there were one or two that looked OK. I wouldn’t necessarily present them to guests, and I would never do so as I’m never ever going to attempt to cook them again for as long as I live, but I would dare bite into one and see how did the quinoa stuffing turned out.
See, this one is not that bad looking. If you are wondering about the sweet potatoes they were all mushy and sweet and so not something I’d eat. I don’t understand how people eat them, they are just too sweet! I’d rather eat a mango!
Biting into one…
Surprisingly not that bad at all. If I may say so myself, they tasted pretty good indeed! They tasted the way a cabbage roll mahshi style should taste even though they didn’t really look the part per say! The quinoa made no difference taste-wise at all. It was the most successful quinoa-rice adaptation I’ve had till date, too bad I’m never going to cook that dish again but I’d gladly prepare my stuffed vine leaves with quinoa now and stuff my face with it again and again and again.
In my distraught status just after I’ve put the pot on the stove I’ve gone a bit mad and came up with this declaration, to be used as a quote from me to all future generations, cheesy as it is: “Love is a woman attempting to cook the impossible, and a man eating the inedible result happily!”.
P.S. Never again *shudders*!
