[Game] Bon appetit mafia game #42

Steaming or boiling in salty water a whole cabbage and removing the leaves who can be rolled and repeating the process until the leaves are too small to be stuffed, is always good for any time of the year we can have a fresh cabbage.
Pickled cabbage is made with autumn cabbage in brine and spices (dry whole dill with seeds and dried corn, whole pepper, some people add horseradish and seeds of mustard) letting the lactic fermentation to do the job and mixing the brine every day until it's done - that's the less enjoyable thing to do because the pickled cabbage has a strong and characteristic smell). Having the proper pickled cabbage makes the dish heavenly delicious, but the wrong type of pickled cabbage can ruin the dish, and that's probably the hardest thing to do. The salt from the brine has to not have iodine because that makes the cabbage soft and yucky.

I never make the filling identical with the recipe from the book. I use what I have but I always need onion cut in the smallest cubes possible, cooked in a pan with oil not too much but enough to fry the onion until becomes transparent. For vegetable rolls shredded carrots, mushrooms and parsley radishes are added in the pan for a few minutes.
The next step is adding sticky rice to it, and mix it with the onion (and the rest of the veggies if you don't want to use meat). For meat rolls the rice is approx 200 g for 1 kg of minced meat and for the veggies rolls it needs 300 g with 3 onions, 3 carrots, 5 mushrooms, and a parsley radish (these also are variables you can change depending on your own taste)
When the onion and rice/onion + rice and veggies are heated together for few minutes, add spices (pepper, salt, fresh dill is optional and used especially for vegetable rolls) and tomato juice (or tomato pasta and water) to help the rice to be cooked inside the rolls.
Add the meat when the onion and rice are cold enough and mix them well with your hands to become like a sticky pasta.
Now that the filling is ready, we prepare a pot putting at the bottom the middle part of the cabbage shredded/chopped, making a layer who is protecting the rolls during the cooking process. Whole pepper and few bay dried leaves (2-3 not more) are used to give flavour, and also dried thyme (I am almost sure we use thymus vulgaris and I am writing this because this plant has relatives looking the same when dried but with a different floral aromatic scent that it's ruining the taste of the dish)

A spoon of the filling is rolled into a half of a big cabbage leaf (taking out the midrib if it's too big) tucking in the ends. When the leaves are smaller one leaf is enough. For the start is not easy to make 2 rolls to look the same but after you do a few hundreds you'll become an expert.
Arrange cabbage rolls in a layer and optionally add for meat rolls smoked meat cut small for extra flavour and the same spices you put at the bottom. Add one or 2 more layers depending on the dimension of the pot and the ingredients you have. When you do all the rolls you cover them with shredded cabbage and add pepper and bay again.

The rice rolls are a little harder to roll because the filling is not sticky and the rolls have to not be tighten to let space for the rice to cook. They are arranged the same way like the meat ones.

Add tomato puree or tomato pasta with water over the rolls until they're covered and boil them until the rice is cooked and the cabbage is completely boiled. It takes one hour or more to complete and an extra time in the oven makes them tastier.

After so much effort it's hard to resist and you may want to take a few to check what happened and if the result is as expected. Sour cream or yogurt is an interesting addition.