My taller half and I are going to a dinner next weekend, with the theme of “Russian food cooked badly.” A kinder way to put it might be “Amateur Russian cuisine night,” because the group is made up out of a few first generation immigrants and people like me, who have studied abroad in Russia and gained some familiarity with the cuisine. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember that I occasionally make borshch beet soup. My taller half, who came to the US at age 14, has told me that “it’s good, but it’s not borshch.” This might be because I am making a vegetarian version without the traditional beef bone or other bits of meat involved, but really I suspect it’s because I’m not his mother.

Recently I recieved a similar review from him when I tried making golubtsi as a warm up for this cooking event. Golubtsi are cabbage rolls, traditionally stuffed with rice and meat and covered in a tomato sauce.

No ground beef for us vegetarians, so I substituted a package of Yves ground round and some Field Roast sausages. I chose apple sage, because I think apple and cabbage go well together. Then I remembered a recipe involving cabbage, apple, and cranberries, so I added about a cup of fresh cranberries (chopped in the food processor).

I fried this up in the sauce pan while a cup of rice cooked and I boiled a head of cabbage to soften the outside leaves.

I also consulted our Russian cookbook for a sauce recipe because last time the sauce I made from memory was all wrong. The cookbook said “sour cream sauce with tomato” for golubtsi and provided a recipe: [500 g sour cream + (25 g flour and/or 300g broth)] + 50g tomato paste. This created a pink concoction which wasn’t quite what I remembered either, but it tasted good, so what the hey.

I got the protein equivalent mixed with the rice and separated some of the outermost cabbage leaves. The Russian cookbook unhelpfully says to fold the leaves “like envelopes.” I took an American approach and rolled them like burritos.

Then they went into a sauce pan to stew in broth. The cookbook said stew for an hour, add the sauce, then steam another 15 minutes. Since I wasn’t cooking meat, I did about 40 minutes, then with sauce for another 10.

Finally, on a plate and ready for eating. The verdict from my taller half: “The cabbage is right, but I’ve never had a sauce anything like this.”

“But I followed the recipe from the cookbook. I did!”

He just shook his head.

I looked online. The first recipe I clicked on also had tomato-smetana sauce, but he was not convinced. I looked more and found a recipe just for golubtsi sauce that is more like a red pasta sauce – shredded carrot, onion and tomato paste simmered together, with option addition of mushrooms. I’ll have to try that next time.  Without the sour cream, the golubtsi would easily be both vegan and gluten free, which isn’t something you usually think of with Russian food. The cooking website I ended up looking at had over 100 golubtsi recipes, with variations including fish, or couscous, so there are plenty of options out there, really.

For amateur cooking night, though, I think I’ve volunteered myself to make “shuba,” or herring in a fur coat. A fur coat made out of beets and sour cream. I’ll let you know how that turns out!