Great family dinners are those where we spend time with our loved ones and enjoy a great meal together. For those special family dinners, cabbage rolls and grape leaves rolls are the perfect food to impress your loved ones.
Sarma and Cabbage rolls recipes
Sarma is popular in the Balkan area of Europe, in the Middle East and parts of Asia. It consists of meat, rice and other vegetables inside grape leaves, and the recipes differ from country to country. The same goes for cabbage rolls. To make things easier, you can adapt the recipe to fit the preferences of your family.
You will need minced meat of your choice (or mushrooms for vegetarians); it can be a mixture of beef and pork, for example. Also, most of us do not have grape trees in our gardens so that we can boil and cook the leaves. Thankfully, most supermarkets have canned grape leaves, which makes things a lot easier. For the cabbage rolls, you can use any type of cabbage leaves.
Step by step instructions
Start by mixing the minced meat with rice, a large onion, an egg, salt, pepper, garlic, and your favourite spices. Then you have to take a bit of the mixture and form a small oval ball. Wrap the grape leaf or the cabbage ball around the oval ball and try to close them as if they were spring rolls.
After finishing wrapping all your sarma and cabbage rolls, take out a large pot and, at the bottom place, some cabbage leaves and then add the sarma and cabbage rolls carefully. In between them, you can add ham, bacon or sausages to add extra flavour.
Then add some water and tomato sauce just to fill the pot right on top of the last layer of sarma and cabbage rolls. Bring to a boil, and then let the pot simmer for three hours. Make sure you constantly check and add more water, if necessary. You can serve them as they come, or you can add a side dish of your choice.
