Stuffed Cabbage

From the ugly but tasty files, I bring you stuffed cabbage (Barefoot Contessa at Home, pp. 106-107).  It’s not pretty, but it tasted so good, and it used our last head of cabbage of the CSA season.  It takes a little puttering and a lot of dirty dishes, but the end result was worth the trouble.  I omitted the raisins and the brown sugar listed in the recipe, because I don’t really do the whole savory/sweet thing for dinner.  I used to have a thing about all raisins found in cooked food, because they got all puffy and swollen.  (Not unlike, as a friend pointed out, ticks.  Yuck.)  I’ve expanded my palate to include raisins baked in things like bread pudding, but I just can’t bear to put them in a dish that also requires ground beef and onions.  Someone’s grandmother is probably rolling over in her grave right now because I omitted the sweet ingredients, so I apologize for that, but we enjoyed our dinner sans fruit.  (I added a little Worcestershire sauce to the meat to up the flavor in place of the raisins and brown sugar.)  Also, I assembled this dish in advance and refrigerated it before baking it, so the cooking time was quite a bit longer than what was called for in the recipe.  I used a meat thermometer to make sure it was fully cooked.