Recipe: Holishkes

Holishkes
Holishkes are cabbage leaves stuffed with meatballs in a tomato-based sweet-and-sour sauce. They are known by many different names (galuptzi, praakes, stuffed cabbage), and are made in many different ways, depending on where your grandmother came from.

8-10 leaves of cabbage
Filling:
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 cup matzah meal
1 large grated onion
2 grated carrots
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
a handful of minced parsley
2 eggs
Sauce:
16 oz. can of tomato sauce
1/4 cup of lemon juice
1/2 cup of brown sugar

Gently remove the cabbage leaves from the head. You want them to be intact. It may help to steam the head briefly before attempting this. Boil the leaves for a minute or two to make them soft enough to roll.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a saucepan and simmer, stirring, until the sugar dissolves (it will dissolve faster if you pour the lemon juice over it). Pour about 1/4 of the sauce into the bottom of a casserole dish or lasagna pan.

Combine all of the filling ingredients in a bowl. Make a ball out of a handful of the filling and roll it up in a cabbage leaf, rolling from the soft end to the spiny end. Put the resulting roll into the casserole dish with the sauce. Do this until you use up all of the filling, making 8-10 cabbage rolls. Then pour the remaining sauce over the top.

Bake approximately 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

If you don't like so much refined sugar in your diet, you can substitute about a cup of raisins or prunes for the brown sugar.