September 30th, 2010

Time to harvest the cabbage!  I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out a good crowd pleaser recipe to use the cabbage (is crowd pleasing cabbage recipe an oxymoron?).  The girls discovered a bunch of caterpillars on our parsley and were well entertained.  They used the outside cabbage leaves for the caterpillars “beds for night night.”

So I’ve already told this story to a number of people, the story of the night of the cabbage.  The bad thing about me already blabbing this story is I’m Italian and the more I tell a story, well….the story gets a little embellished with each time, it’s in my DNA.  So I’m going to scale back and tell it the way I remember. 

When I was looking at Cooking Light’s website for cabbage dishes I stumbled upon a recipe for Roasted Cabbage Rolls and immediately thought of my Grandma Coco.  She used to make stuffed cabbage rolls and I loved them.  Then I saw the pretty picture and decided this was it.  It had meat (actually 2 meats), so Trent would be happy and it has a sweet tomato sauce on top and apples in it, so semi-kid friendly, right?

The recipe was a little more labor intensive than I normally like on a Thursday.  But I was already excited about trying something completely new and using the cabbage I planted in the spring finally.  I was probably in the kitchen fixing this and the homemade mashed potatoes for at least two hours an hour and a half.  I knew the kids would definitely eat the potatoes (I have surrendered to peeling them now for mashed potatoes so the kids don’t balk at skin specks…..) and was hoping for good things. 

So there’s my cabbage roll and mashed potatoes.  Love and nutrition on a plate for my family…….and my family rejected my love.  This is how it went down:

Me to Trent: So how do you like it?

Trent: Well, not a big fan of all the onions in it.

Me: It doesn’t have onions in it, those are apples.

Trent: Oh.

Me: So???

Trent: Well maybe I don’t like apples in savory dishes.

Me: Oh.

Trent: And I don’t like cabbage.

Lauren: Mom, this doesn’t taste very good.

Sydney: Mommy, I don’t want anymore of this (pointing to cabbage roll).  I want dessert.

So after dinner I get on the phone and explain to Grandpa Coco that Trent is going to deliver some food to him in a minute and I package some up for my parents too.

I had Grandpa Coco over for dinner just last Saturday and the first thing he said to me was “Wow, those cabbage rolls and potatoes were just delicious.  You know Grandma used to make cabbage rolls too, thank you!”

And that’s why Grandpa Coco is the cutest thing in the world!

 

By the way, Trent asked me last week with a slightly scared look in his eyes if I was going to blog about this…..he’s never asked that before…..hmmm…..