Mawneze and too many cabbage rolls

My mom's family is Cajun. They came over on one of the seven ships, picked out a bayou and immediately started boiling crawfish in the front yard. I am not Cajun. I spent too many years in Bossier City. Have you been there? It's where Bush hid out on 9/11 until people started calling the local radio station and saying, "Hey, Air Force One just flew over my house." But I digress. Years ago, I called my Cajun aunt to get her instructions for making chicken salad. I knew the directions would be vague. Recipes from my mother's side of the family always are vague. Always. You cook something until it looks right. You add ingredients until you've added enough. But that chicken salad was good. I was determined to at least take a stab at it. My aunt started by warning me that I'd have to buy a chicken cut I probably didn't even know grocery stores sold. I gamely wrote down "cheap chicken parts" as the first ingredient. Then she described how to put the chicken through a grinder. As I tried to mentally calculate how much a grinder would cost me, I heard her say, "And you're going to need a little mawneze." Thinking I'd heard her wrong, I asked her to repeat the ingredient. I'd heard right. Mawneze. "Can I find that at any grocery store?" I asked. "Oh, yes, any grocery store would have that," she said. Perplexed, I hung up the phone and called my cousin Kim, who promptly said, "She meant mayonnaise, you silly goose." Except she may have said idiot instead of silly goose.

I took a little break from Cajun cooking after that but decided to make my Mom's cabbage rolls for the new year. I know cabbage rolls are Swedish, but my Cajun grandmother used to make them. Here's the recipe, per my mother (and recipe is a very loose term): Make some rice. Boil some cabbage. Cook some ground beef. Put the rice and ground beef into cabbage leaves and shove it into the oven. No measurements. What could go wrong?

Step 1: Make some rice. I use sushi rice. It's sticky goodness.
I got a rice cooker years ago. Recently, I upgraded to a larger cooker. I love my rice cooker. You measure out the rice and water, punch a button and then walk away and forget about it until the cooker beeps at you. It's the perfect appliance.













Step 2: Boil some cabbage. I had to consult a cookbook on this step. My mother didn't specify whether the water should be boiling before I put the cabbage in. I'm sure this is an intuitive step for most cooks, but I need explicit directions. I ended up boiling the water and then adding the cabbage leaves. The leaves started the color of a watery, pale green and transformed into the color of a crisp dollar bill. Very cool.










Step 3: Cook some ground beef. One thing that confuses me about my grandmother's recipes is that they never mention the holy trinity: onions, bell pepper and celery. Did she not use them? How could she not have used them? I just add them anyway. I chopped them up, softened them a little in a pan before adding the ground beef and then added more onion. You can never have enough onion.

Step 4: Put the rice and the ground beef into the cabbage leaves. Easy peasy. Unless you're me. I scooped the meat mixture into the leaves, carefully rolled them and nestled them into a baking dish. Guess what I forgot? The rice!!! So I just left out the rice. Cabbage means money. Black eyed peas mean luck. No one's ever said anything to me about rice meaning anything but filler.

Step 5: Into the oven. I made the cabbage rolls for my in-laws. Before my husband left for Tampa, I said to him, "Can you call your sister and make sure she's not making New Year's Day dinner for them?" He assured me that she was not cooking so I got up early and got to work on the dinner. Naturally, my sister-in-law phoned me a few hours later and told me not to bother with cooking because she made a huge dinner for my in-laws. Mr. G.'s going to be eating cabbage rolls for a month once he gets back to Baton Rouge.