Hello everyone! Jess here. I’ve been trying a lot of different recipes this week, some are winners and some not so much. It makes me grateful for the new format of CSA365 where we are talking about veggies and herbs and working on Veggiescope in between the recipes. Last year, we did a daily recipe, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The new format this year allows us to post only the “good” ones, freeing us up to experiment and to put forth better ideas. Thank you for following this blog, for posting things you like, things you’d change, and your own contributions that allow this site to be useful for the generations of CSA members to come!
Back to today’s recipe: This recipe was inspired from an old cookbook of my mother’s, (The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook, by Jean Hewitt) for Hunter’s Loaf. The recipe as pictured is basically a meat loaf surrounded in cabbage leaves, a cross between a giant cabbage roll and a lasagna of sorts, and it’s gooooood! The original recipe calls for what I considered an inordinate amount of olives. Like, chopped olives in the loaf and whole olives just put into the gravy. I found them to be a bit too much, overpowering the tender sweet cabbage, and perhaps better with a tough and behemoth cabbage that needs TLC, not for our dear lovingly crafted Springdell cabbage. Here is the recipe that emerged with CSA inspiration!
Ingredients:
- kosher salt, a tablespoon or so
- 1 medium head of cabbage
- 1 1/2 pounds ground beef (I got the Springdell 2 pound package, and used the extra 1/2 pound to make burgers for the boys, as the loaf looked too out there for them)
- 1/4 cup onion, finely chopped
- 2 eggs
- Freshly ground black pepper to taste
- 1/2 cup bread crumbs
- 1/4 cup milk
- 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (or 1/4 teaspoon dried)
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
- 1 finely diced tomato (or 1/4 cup ketchup if the tomatoes aren’t in season)
- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce
- Beef Broth/Beef Bone Broth as needed
- (optional) dry white wine as needed
Core the cabbage and separate the leaves as you boil up a large pot of water with roughly 1 tablespoon of the salt. Cook the cabbage leaves until they are just wilted, 5-8 minutes. Immediately drain them.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Beat the egg and combine with the ground beef, onions, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire Sauce, tomato or ketchup, thyme, milk, and salt and pepper to taste.
Liberally butter up a 9X5X3 inch loaf pan, and layer in some (about 1/3rd) of the “prettier” cabbage leaves (these will be the viewable ones when you turn the loaf out later).
Layer half of the meat mixture into the loaf pan. Follow this with the second third of the smaller and flimsier cabbage leaves. Finish with a final layer of meat and a final layer of cabbage leaves.
Cover the pan loosely with foil and place the pan on top of a rimmed baking sheet. Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes. Let cool for a few before turning the loaf out into a serving plate.
Once it was clear the loaf pan would separate from the loaf, I put the pan back on top to keep it warm while it rested. The loaf gives off juices which you’ll want to drain off the platter and baking sheet into a cup very carefully (I used heat proof silicone gloves). Ideally, you want about 3/4 cups of liquid total, substituting bone broth as needed to reach the correct amount (my loaf was juicy this time and no extra broth was needed)
As the loaf rested and the juices were dripping, I mixed one tablespoon of butter into a pan, followed by one tablespoon of flower, over low heat, and whisking constantly. By then I had enough liquid to begin to add to the flour/butter mixture, and slowly did so while continuing to whisk (this will keep it creamy) as things began to bubble and thicken.
I mixed in a bit of white wine to thin it out a tiny bit. The gravy could be served on the side.
You can see the olives in the gravy, and the last step in the recipe was to add the whole olives to the gravy, but in the future I’ll let the local flavors shine through.
Not too pretty, but awfully delicious! Next time I plan to make a meat loaf and there’s a cabbage floating around, I’ll be making this again!