Sarma Chameleon

Last night, I made food I could not eat.

It was not my intention. The recipe looked really good, and Pete said that the end product was really good as well (he ate a lot of it), but I could not do it.

The recipe was stuffed cabbage rolls, also called "sarma." I found it in this great little cookbook I have that collects recipes from the Upper Midwest region and which I can't name, of course, being the unhelpful soul that I am. I think I would have been fine with just the cabbage roll part of it, but when the cabbage rolls went on top of a layer of sauerkraut, onions, and fennel, and under a can of crushed tomatoes, it lost me. The smell was too much like the Harvest of Horror when my mother planted nine hundred tomato plants and had to can the resulting 175 thousand tomatoes. The house smelled like stewed tomatoes for an eternity (Mom says I was three years old), and that period of time has a lot to do with my life-long aversion to raw tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, or tomatoes in any form that is too close to their original tomatoey state. I can't even watch people eat raw tomatoes, a fact which Pete used to find overly amusing.

Pete's going to have to eat the whole thing, I think. I might be able to salvage a cabbage roll or two out of the melange, but we'll see. I am not hopeful.

They were fun to make, though, and it's nice to cook again--I feel like I have not done much of it lately. I may regret this one, though; they are a mixture of pork sausage, ground beef, and spices wrapped in blanched cabbage leaves, on top of the aforementioned sauerkraut and onion mixture, so they may as well be called "Fart Rolls." Surprisingly, we slept well, and I was not smoked out of the bedroom, so maybe it's Pete's coworkers who have to worry.