It wasn’t until after I realized that the cabbages I bought for cabbage rolls were not the most well-suited for the job that I remembered how fussy my mom was about her cabbages. You see, I only make cabbage rolls on the occasional Christmas. Now that I think about it, my mom would make my dad go to two or three stores if necessary to get the right ones. The perfect cabbage is on the small side, so each leave makes a modest-sized cabbage roll. As well, each cabbage has many usable leaves. She could tell the perfect cabbage at a glance.

The ones I bought were really too big, and the leaves thickened quickly as I worked through them. This isn’t to say my cabbage rolls are not going to be good. They will be super-delicious. I do after all know THE SECRET. However, they will not be the uniform perfectly-sized cabbage rolls my mom used to produce every time.

They’re in the oven now, and there they’ll stay for at least 3 hours. The house smells amazing right now. I put a strip of back ribs on top of the cabbage rolls the way mom used to do, and I nested them in a roaster lined with cabbage. That cabbage in contact with the roaster will darken and caramelize and become cabbage candy.

For today my work is done. Time to sit back and play the banjo for a while.