Hi, Y'all!
From the bottom of my heart I wish you a happy new year filled with peace, joy, health and also success in any form. Spend time with your loved ones, don't put off anything you want to do and enjoy life to the fullest - nobody knows how long it will last.
Our New Year's eve was pretty lazy at first, and then we had a nice dinner. Not the usual suspects like raclette or fondue, no - this year we had vegetarian cabbage rolls with dumpling filling and mulled wine sauce. It was quite elaborate thus we won't have that every week. But absolutely delicious!
Why elaborate? Well, you start with the dumpling filling, that means, you fry garlic and onions in a pan with herbs de Provence and add some plant based milk to heat it slightly. Add all these ingredients to some diced stale bread. Mix in an egg and some grated carrot and let that rest for half an hour. Season thoroughly because the filling soaks up spices like a sponge.
Fry some mushrooms, season them as well and set them aside. In case you still have some leftover bread, dice it and fry it, too, and sprinkle it with some sea salt. Set aside too, will be needed for serving later.
Remove the stalk of the cabbage and carefully separate the single leaves - they should stay more or less intact. That might get more difficult the closer you get to the center of the cabbage, because the leaves are more folded then. But with some patience one can manage that. Then I blanched the leaves in boiling water and cut the middle ribs of the leaves which were too thick. You could have done that before, but I didn't want them to fall apart in the water. After that you layer two or three leaves and brush the inner leaf with mustard. Place roughly a tablespoon of dumpling filling in the middle and add some of the fried mushrooms. With all your light-fingeredness you can muster fold it into a roll and fix it with some kitchen yarn or toothpicks. I then put all my rolls into a large dutch oven, added some vegetable stock and let that simmer for 45 minutes with a closed lid.
In parallel, I fried some diced mushrooms, onions and carrots, deglaced them with mulled wine (normal red or even beer would work as well) and filled up with veggie stock. That simmered also for 40 minutes with a closed lid. The recipe called for sieving the sauce and thicken it with flour afterwards, but I couldn't stand to throw away the perfectly fine veggies. Thus I blended them in the sauce and saved me the thickening.
For serving I first poured some sauce onto the plate, then placed the rolls on top and garnished them with the croutons and some roasted sunflower seeds. You could offer mashed potatoes as a side dish, but the dumpling as filling worked fine for us.
For Christmas we had our traditional potato salad and wieners on Dec 24, and on Christmas day we were invited by neighbours/friends. Thus on boxing day I had enough leisure time at hand to prepare a vegetarian "meatloaf" - which also couldn't be done in a haste...
And what I also wanted to mention: Unlike in Germany, there are only orchestrated fireworks here in Malta. Organised by highly skilled specialists with a licence and with fireworks which weren't thrown together in some eastern European backyard with highly dubious ingredients. Usually it takes place in the capital, Valletta, but this year they made an exception and transferred it to Mellieha. That came in very handy, because after our dinner it took us only five minutes of walking to get to the spectacle. And it really was spectacular! Although not very long (appr. 20 minutes or so), but there was some music, some drinks, nice temperature outside, no-one got hurt by fireworks, the crowd was manageable and everybody was in a good mood. Community service took care of the cleaning up, and neither days before nor after people were disturbed by stray fireworks. Children with a light sleep and frightful animals definitely appreciated that. I like!
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