Cultural identity through food Eat well,travel often!

Passport & Plate - Holishkes

Israel | Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 4 photos

Ingredients
5-8 leaves of cabbage

Filling:
0.5 lb. ground beef
1/4 cup matzah meal
1 medium onion (chopped into small pieces)
2 grated carrots
2 cloves of garlic (grated)
a handful of minced parsley
2 eggs
Sauce:
10 oz. can of tomato sauce
1/8 cup of lemon juice
1/4 cup of brown sugar

 

How to prepare this recipe
1. Boil the leaves for a few minutes to make them soft enough to roll.
2.Then put all the sauce ingredients into a saucepan, sim and stir them till the sugar get dissolved, you can speed this process if you pour the lemon juice over it.
3. Combine all needed filling ingredients in a bowl. Make a ball out of a handful of the filling and roll it up in a cabbage leaf, rolling from the soft end to the spiny end. Put the resulting roll into the casserole dish with the sauce. Do this until you use up all of the filling, making 5-8 cabbage rolls. Then pour the remaining sauce over the top.

Bake approximately 40 minutes at 250 degrees.

 

The story behind this recipe
I was/am active member of Couchsurfing system which gave me the chance to meet people from all over the world and host them in my apartment in the duration of their trip, numerically from 42 countries, they represented almost all religions, different way of thinking, attitude, intercultural sensitivity. This system could be very colourful and vivid memories creator if we do not misuse it. Usually my guests showed me one-one meal from their own cuisine and I also show some classic Hungarian food in return. My favourite was the upper written Holishkes that was shown by my Israeli surfer, this meal is supposed to prepare for "Sukkot" holiday although my friend did not know the exact reason. historically I picked for this meal as my best because we have very similar one in the Hungarian cuisine, we used to serve that for Christmas, and the stuffed cabbage is almost elementary part of all culture with alternative names, made for different occasions.