Stewed cabbage with meatballs is a tasty, healthy and easy-to-prepare dish that will become a complete dinner or hearty breakfast for the whole family.
Content:
- Choosing cabbage and preparing it for stewing
- The main subtleties when stewing cabbage
- Ingredients
- Step by step cooking
- Video recipe
The available ingredients, amazing taste and ease of preparation make this common dish one of our favorites. However, in order for the food to turn out great, you need to know some useful tips.
Choosing cabbage and preparing it for stewing
Heads of cabbage should be chosen with greenish (but not white) leaves, they contain a lot of mineral salts that are useful for the human body. If the head of cabbage has yellow or black spots, this indicates that the vegetable was sick, it is better to refrain from buying such a product.
The selected head of cabbage is thoroughly washed before cooking, the upper hard leaves are removed, divided into parts, freed from the stump and chopped into strips. For shredding, it is advisable to use a special knife for cutting cabbage, or a knife with cloves. They are convenient for chopping cabbage finely and thinly.
The main subtleties when stewing cabbage
Many novice housewives, sending chopped cabbage to stew in a pan, think that there is a very large amount of it, and such a volume will not interfere. However, this is a misconception, since cabbage gradually begins to settle during the frying process, and its quantity decreases significantly. Therefore, you should not worry about this, after 5 minutes of stewing, the cabbage will slightly decrease in volume, and then it will decrease, almost 2 times.
Another thing to know is that cabbage perfectly absorbs moisture. Therefore, during stewing, you can add hot water to it, and pour very little vegetable oil, just to lubricate the pan. During frying, it will absorb this water, which will make it juicy, and most importantly not greasy.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 148 kcal.
- Servings - 4
- Cooking time - 50 minutes
Ingredients:
- White cabbage - 1 kg
- Meatballs - 25-30 pcs. (or for their preparation you will need 500 g of any meat and 1 small head of onion)
- Tomato paste - 2 tablespoons
- Refined vegetable oil - for frying
- Garlic - 2-3 cloves
- Salt to taste
- Ground black pepper - to taste
- Bay leaf - 2-3 pcs.
- Allspice peas - 3-4 pcs.
- Dill - small bunch
Cooking stewed cabbage with meatballs
1. Chop the cabbage finely, taking into account all the tips and subtleties that are described above, in the section "Choosing cabbage and preparing it for stewing."
2. Put the frying pan on the stove, pour in some vegetable oil, which you can replace with any other, and heat. Then we send the cabbage to fry.
3. Pour about 50 g of hot water to the cabbage in a frying pan, season with salt and pepper and bring until soft and golden brown over low heat. Make sure that the cabbage does not run out of liquid, otherwise it will burn. If all the water evaporates, add a little. When the cabbage is brought to the desired consistency, add tomato paste to it, mix well, cover the pan with a lid and simmer it over low heat for about 15 minutes.
4. Simultaneously with stewing the cabbage, cook the meatballs, namely, heat a pan with vegetable oil and send them to fry over medium heat. I prepare meatballs for future use and use when necessary. But to cook them initially, take a piece of any meat, wash it and pass it through a medium or fine grinder. Peel, wash and twist the onions. Season the minced meat with salt, black pepper, stir and form into small walnut-sized meatballs. Such meatballs can be immediately used in dishes, or laid out on a board and sent to the freezer, and after freezing, put them in a bag.
5. So, fry the meatballs until golden and add chopped garlic to them in the pan.
6. Cook the garlic meatballs for about 5 minutes over medium heat.
7. After that, put bay leaf, allspice and garlic fried meatballs into a frying pan with cabbage. Stir everything, reduce heat to low, cover the pan and simmer the food for 20 minutes.
8. At the end of cooking, place finely chopped dill in the pan. I also use it frozen, which I prepared for the future in the summer. Simmer the food for another 5 minutes and you can serve the dish to the table.
See also the video recipe: Stewed cabbage.
