Vegetarian cabbage rolls (Kåldolmar)

Cabbage rolls (Kåldolmar) is a dish with long tradition in Scandinavia. The traditional recipe is with ground beef. If you ask my generation or younger generations, I don’t think many will answer that they do this dish very often today. I have made a modern touch on the cabbage rolls and I think this is sooo delicious. Why do we all eat fresh spring rolls so often but not cabbage rolls? You just have to try this!

A Swedish chef, Zeina Mourtada, has inspired me how you can prepare the cabbage in a really easy way. Almost without doing anything. So smart (see below)! Thank you, Zeina! 🙂

Ingredients (4 pers):

• 1 green cabbage

Filling

• 1 onion
• 1/2 tbsp butter
• 1 cup quinoa (I used organic Tri-color quinoa)
• 10 oz beans (I used 3 different; chickpeas, kidney beans and black beans)
• 2 carrots
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp salt
• pinch of black pepper

Other

• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 cup water
• fresh thyme

The green cabbage leaves needs to be soft before start to roll. I just learned how to do this in a really easy way. So instead of boiling the cabbage, you actually just put it in the freezer for 48 hours. Then you take it out and let it rest in room temperature. Thereafter you can take off the leaves, one by one and they are ready to be filled and rolled. Prepare to have 12 leaves ready to fill.

Prepare the filling. Peel and cut the onion. Fry it on medium temperature in a pan with butter. Fry until the onion gets a bit of color.

Prepare the quinoa according to the instruction on the packaging.

Peel and grate the carrots.

Add the fried onion, ready boiled quinoa, beans, grated carrots, egg, salt and pepper into a bowl and mix it quickly together with a spoon.

Pre heat the oven to 350ºF.

Take one cabbage leaf and fill with approximately two table spoons of filling. Fold the left and the right side of the cabbage leaf towards the middle and the roll the leaf together. Place each filled leaf into an ovenproof tray. When all leaves are filled, pour some maple syrup over the rolls. Pour water into the tray. Cover the oven tray with aluminium foil.  Place in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. Then take off the aluminium foil and let the rolls bake for another approximately 15 minutes or until they get a nice golden color.

Serve the cabbage rolls with fresh thyme and lingonberry (or e.g. sweet chili sauce).

Smaklig måltid!

My oven mitt is from Swedish “Svenskt Tenn” and my plate is from Danish “Broste Copenhagen”.