Seafood stew on a cold, rainy day

Today was cold, rainy, and the best sort of weather for staying indoors with a good book or video game, and it just so happens to be the day slated to try out Seafood Stew. When I first decided to cook through the list of Tales of Symphonia recipes, I just looked up the names of the recipes on Google. Most of the recipes came from allrecipes.com, as is the case for Seafood Stew, which is a thick, American-style stew. Here is the recipe, courtesy of allrecipes.com:

Seafood Stew

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups chicken broth 1/2 cup uncooked long grain rice 2 teaspoons chili powder 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained 3/4 cup julienned green pepper

3/4 cup julienned sweet red or yellow pepper 1/2 cup thinly sliced onion 8 ounces orange roughy or red snapper fillets, cut into 1-inch pieces 4 ounces uncooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined 3/4 cup orange juice concentrate

Directions:

1.

In a saucepan, bring broth to a boil. Add the rice, chili powder and garlic; return to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until rice is tender. Add the tomatoes, peppers and onion. Cover and cook over medium heat until vegetables are tender. Add fish, shrimp and orange juice concentrate. Cover and simmer for 2-4 minutes or until the fish flakes easily with a fork and the shrimp turn pink. I also included dried seaweed (like the stuff that goes around sushi) to replace the kelp that the game requires, some lemon juice (no scurvy for us!) and some black pepper because, as I think I've mentioned, I put black pepper on almost everything. We're having this flavorful stew with a side of cornbread, courtesy of a Jiffy cornbread mix. :-)  And the verdict is.... It's... different. Not quite what I was expecting. If you like citrus and fish, you'll probably like this stew. And that's all I have to say about that.

Dwarven Vow #1: Let's all work together for a peaceful world.

In the spirit of working together -- and producing a palatable product on a day where I worked two four-hour shifts at two different jobs in retail for the third day in a row-- my husband put his Polish (well, quarter-Polish) hands to work making stuffed cabbage. Yeah, so we definitely went with the default recipe without adding the Tales-inspired ingredient cheese. Sorry, Genis. Your cooking ideas were odd, and practice makes permanent. We did add the mushrooms, though.

Here's the family recipe we used:

1 head of cabbage (boiled whole)
1 lb. hamburger meat
1-2 cups rice
2-3 slices of bacon, fried and chopped up finely (oops, forgot this one)
a few mushrooms, cut up and sauteed (Tales-inspired ingredient not found in the original recipe) 
2 cans tomato soup

1. Boil the cabbage until it is boiled through. This will take a long time.
2. Cook rice according to package instructions. 
3. Sautee mushrooms in a little butter while rice is finishing up.
4. Cook bacon, then cut it up finely. (Traditionally, you're supposed to use salt pork, but bacon is what we have at my house.)
5. Mix together bacon (including fat that cooked out of it), hot rice, mushrooms, and beef. The heat from the rice, plus the time spent baking in the crockpot should cook it through. If you're squeamish, though, go ahead and cook the hamburger meat at least partway in the bacon fat and mushrooms.
6. Peel off cabbage leaves carefully. The first couple will probably fall to pieces, but you should have a relatively sturdy, pliable leaf soon enough. Spoon filling into a cabbage leaf, and then fold the leaf around the filling carefully. Place folded-side down in the crockpot or slow cooker.

7. Be sure to get a full layer on the bottom of the crockpot, and then pour one can of tomato soup over the stuffed cabbage. Then, you can use any weak or easily torn leaves as a layer before putting in the next layer of stuffed cabbage leaves. The better the cabbage and/or the better job you did boiling your cabbage, the fewer leaves you will have that fall apart.
8. Top the whole thing with the second can of tomato soup, and then cook in the crockpot. If you use the low setting, it'll take 6-8 hours. If you cook it on high, it'll take about 3 hours. Sure, it's labor-intensive, but it's good and relatively cheap meal.

9. If you want to top it a la Tales of Symphonia, sprinkle cheese on top, but when I mentioned this to my husband, he looked horrified. I think it would be good, but, then again, I forgot to add it to mine. Guess I'll have to try to remember the cheese with the leftovers sitting in my fridge. :-) They do reheat well!

The trick to good stuffed cabbage (AKA cabbage rolls) is a good cabbage. I apparently do not have a discerning enough eye to pick a good cabbage. Either that, or we over-boiled the leaves. In any case, the leaves weren't strong or sturdy enough to really wrap around the filling.

Oh well, at least stuffed cabbage has the time-honored family tradition of being hard to mess up if you follow directions, it reheats well, and OH MY GOSH it makes a lot of food. For the two of us, at least. Two or three rolls are enough for a pretty substantial meal for me and my short, mid-twenties self. If only life were so simple, you know? Then again, if life could be lived by a formula beyond love God, love others, and take care of business, it'd be a lot less interesting. It probably wouldn't have very many good stories for the video games. :-)