Cabbage Rolls or Goloubki

Ingredients:

I head cabbage (medium or large)
1.5 lb ground beef, pork, veal (you can use the mixture of different meats or just pork but the total weight should be about 1.5 lbs)
16 oz can tomato sauce
2.5 cups rice
salt and pepper to taste
Optional:
1 maggi cube (beef, chicken or vegetable flavor bouillon cube)
100 g fresh mushrooms
some onion
1-2 Tbsp. margarine

Procedure:

Stuffing (filling) preparation

Cook the rice. In one pan heat the ground meat, add salt and pepper to taste. In another pan fry sliced onion with margarine, add sliced mushrooms, salt and pepper to taste, some water if needed. When it is all ready - mix well rice, ground beef and mushrooms together, taste, add spices if needed.

Cabbage wrap preparation

Remove the core from the cabbage. Place the cabbage to a big pot with boiling water (it does not need to cover the whole cabbage, but then you have to flip the cabbage to make sure that the whole head would heat up), remove the leaves as they soften one after one. You may keep a water heated on low heat.

I usually prepare cabbage leaves after stuffing is ready because the leaves need to be warm to wrap nicely around the stuffing.

Cabbage rolls preparation

Place about 1-2 Tbsp. of the meat mixture (depending on the size of the leaf) in the center of the cabbage leaf and wrap the leaf like an envelope with the meat inside - this is a pigeon (golabek). Put some empty leaves on the bottom of the big pot to prevent burning, place the pigeons close to each other in the layers, so that they would not loose filling during cooking.