Vegetarian Stuffed Cabbage

I've always liked stuffed cabbage. That's not a particularly novel sentiment, I know, but it's always seemed like good winter comfort food for me. The stuffed cabbage I grew up with was a rice, tomato, and meat mixture in the cabbage, I think with some tomato sauce on the side. Now, I like tomatoes, rice, and cabbage as much as the next girl, but I've never been into meat. So I've always wanted to find a stuffed cabbage recipe that was delicious and meatless, and not just a veggie version of a meat dish. I guess you could always substitute lentils for the meat in the original recipe and call it a day, but I never did get around to that, and I kept a lookout for a recipe that was meant to be meatless.

Little pockets of stuffed cabbage goodness!

And I found one in one of the five cookbooks I got for Christmas (you'd hope, out of five cookbooks, there'd be a recipe for everything!). This particular cookbook, Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi, was a gift from my wonderful brother and sister-in-law. It's a collection of recipes that were originally published in Ottolenghi's The New Vegetarian column in the London Guardian's weekend magazine. Ottolenghi, a well known London chef who has published many other cookbooks, is not a vegetarian himself. He credits his "vegetarian image" to his childhood growing up in the Middle East and Italy and the abundance of vegetables and grains in those cuisines. It's interesting to have a non-vegetarian write a vegetarian cookbook - he suggests meat pairings when appropriate - and in a way, the philosophy of the book aligns more with my own food preferences than many vegetarian books. I'm not against people eating meat, I just prefer not to, and these recipes are not against people cooking with meat, they just happen to not have any. If that makes sense.

This cabbage doesn't know what I have in store for it.

Anyway, I opened the book on Christmas and then sat on the couch and flipped through it page by page. Each page and each accompanying picture made me say something like, "oh, that looks good" or, "ooh, I'd eat that." And in the month since Christmas, we've made three of the recipes in the book (keep in mind those four other cookbooks, too!), and they've all been good. The vegetable paella was absolutely amazing - I'll blog about it the next time we make it - and the black pepper tofu was delicious but led to our discovery that there IS such a thing as too much black pepper. And then there's this one: stuffed cabbage. And not a stuffed cabbage that started life as a meat-based meal and ended up as some vegetarian substitute. This is a veggie stuffed cabbage that was always meant to be a veggie stuffed cabbage - just what I was looking for!

Blanched leaves ready to go.

What's odd about the recipe is that the stuffing uses a mixture of pasta and rice. I would never normally mix pasta and rice - so much starch! - but Ottolenghi writes that this is a common combination in Arab and Turkish cuisine. So, okay, that's cool. The rest of the stuffing is ricotta, pine nuts, mint, garlic, parmesan, and parsley. And I have to say, the stuffing on it's own is pretty delicious. It's even more delicious once it's rolled into some blanched cabbage leaves, covered with a white wine sauce, and baked for about an hour.

The stuffing - it's pretty tasty on it's own, too!

The recipe provides two sets of instructions for blanching the cabbage leaves. I did the first, which is cutting the head in half, peeling each leaf off each half, and blanching the peeled leaves. The other one is cutting the core out and putting the whole cabbage into a pot of boiling water and peeling off the outer leaves as they cook. I had a hard time peeling off the cabbage leaves without breaking them, and I ended up with a lot of small leaves, which meant a lot of small stuffed cabbages instead of a few larger ones. That's okay, clearly, but peeling the leaves off turned out to be a lot of work. I blame the cabbage since it wasn't particularly large or round to begin with.

Ready to go in the oven.

It's really delicious! The pasta/rice mixture is actually pretty light and not at all heavy like you'd expect if you top pasta with rice. The wine accentuates the sweetness in the cabbage, and the garlic and herbs in the stuffing keeps it delicious. It makes quite a bit, and the leftovers reheat nicely.

Stuffed Cabbage
Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

2 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 1/2 oz. vermicelli noodles (not the rice kind) I used angel hair pasta, but a thin spaghetti would work, too.
7/8 cup basmati rice
1 1/4 cups water
salt
medium-sized head of cabbage
1/3 cup pine nuts, toasted and chopped (full disclosure: I didn't chop them. Life went on.)
3/4 cup ricotta
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
3 Tbsp chopped mint
4 Tbsp chopped parsley
3 cloves garlic, crushed and coarsely chopped
black pepper
1 cup dry white wine
6 tbsp vegetable stock (I used chicken broth because that's what I had. Which means I unvegetarian-ized a vegetarian recipe - crazy.)
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
4 Tbsp olive oil

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Break the vermicelli into 3/4-in long pieces and add them to the pan. Cook for 1-2 minutes, being sure not to burn them. As soon as the noodles start turning golden brown, add the rice and stir well. Then add the water and 1/2 tsp salt, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to low, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, and let sit for 10 minutes before removing the lid and letting it cool.

Blanch the cabbage leaves in boiling water for 6-8 minutes (see above for method). Run leaves under cool water, let dry.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add ricotta, nuts, half the Parmesan, the herbs, garlic, salt, and pepper to the rice. Mix well. Use the cooked cabbage leaves to make parcels of whatever size depending on the size of the leaves and how much filling you want in them. Arrange the stuffed cabbages close together in an ovenproof dish, using cabbage trimmings to fill any gaps.

Whisk together the wine, stock, sugar, olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the cabbage and put the dish in the oven. Bake for about 40 minutes, or until almost all of the liquid is gone. Sprinkle with remaining Parmesan, and continue baking for another 10 minutes or so until the cheese has melted and turned golden. Remove from the oven, let rest for 5 minutes before serving.