1. Boil one head of cabbage in water about 15-20 minutes. Drain and cool.
2. In a bowl, mix:
3/4 lb ground beef
2 TB uncooked rice
1 grated onion (sm)
1/2 TB ketchup
1 egg
salt & pepper
3. In another bowl, mix sauce:
1 large can tomatoes
1 large can tomato soup (or sauce)
scant 1/2 c brown sugar
lemon juice to taste
4. Separate cabbage leaves and roll a small amount of the above
mixture in each leaf. NOTE: If you have leftover mixture after filling
leaves, you can roll the mixture into tiny meatballs.
5. In deep pot, put alternating layers, first of sauce (crumble a
handful of ginger snaps into bottom layer of sauce), then a layer of
rolled cabbage leaves (and tiny meatballs, if you have any), then one
layer of sliced onion rings, then repeat.
6. NOTE: If you'd like to get a second meal out of this, put a nice
piece of chuck roast in the bottom of the pot, on top of the first
layer of sauce and below the first layer of rolled cabbage.
7. Cook on low heat, covered, for about 2 1/2 hours.
Author's Diary, Day 11: I spent almost four years, asking everybody I ran into to tell me stories about my grandmother, who died in 1992. I heard about how she liked to make peanut butter taffy when she was a girl and about how she delivered babies when she was a nurse in her small eastern Kentucky town. 
A Nelson Long Neck sounds like beer to me. A new kind of frosty, delicious beer. This explains why I got so excited when a reader wrote to suggest I try one while the weather is hot. But then the Nelson turned out to be a brightly colored 你懂的vnp2021($12.95), with eight different spray settings and an ergonomic comfort handle. "The colors are a bit bright, but you can always find them in the grass," wrote Stephen, a gardener whose plants are no doubt surviving this summer's heat wave very happily. (He also had nice things to say about customer service at Mastergardening.com, which replaced his nozzle promptly after a metal clip failed.)
Author's Diary, Day 4: Every book is missing something. Mine left out all the top-secret recipes -- for candy and desserts mostly, because we have a real sweet tooth in my family -- that my great grandmother and her daughters used to make a long time ago in Kentucky.
Author's Diary, Day 2: First, pick a topic that is considered to be universally sexy like, say, Kentucky.
Day 1: My book is published. 
Nobody has more quarts of test paints lying around the house. After decades of trying to find no-fail paint colors, my list only includes two: Benjamin Moore's Windham Cream (HC-6) and Donald Kaufman's DKC-37 (a silvery blue). To add to this list, readers have sent their own suggestions. Will they work? Get out your fan decks and check them out: 
After I wrote about my obsession with planting clematis vines everywhere -- on the trellis, on the fence, on a wire pyramid garden structure that I bought in desperation after I ran out of trellises and walls -- I heard from a number of readers who were similarly addicted. Deborah, a clematis lover who has 110 cultivars in her garden, suggested I make room for some of her favorites: "Please try durandi (herbaceous) and regency or julia correvan (climbers)...just to mention 3." 
Some topics strike a real chord with readers. After my newspaper column last week about my dog's billy club of a tail, a lot of people wrote to commiserate. I was relieved to learn my dog Otto is not the only pet who drove his owner to purchase stemless glasses in defense. And I was particularly haunted by one reader's story: 
Yesterday I got back from China, where I shopped at the stalls of Beijing's enormous Panjiayuan Flea Market. I bought glass beads (20 yuan), an old wooden-case mantel clock with a ticking Mao (80 yuan), a long cloth decorated with a traditional Miao design (140 yuan) and a Coca-Cola (10 yuan). If I had more time and if airplanes had bigger overhead compartments for carry-on luggage, I also would have brought home a painted wooden footstool (40 yuan), a hand mirror decorated with a painted of three pink-cheeked Red Guard girls (150 yuan), Cultural Revolution posters, a huge Buddha for the garden and an old Underwriter typewriter (price unknown). 
It's no secret my family is addicted to board games. After reading my 你懂的vnp2021 this week, a number of readers wrote to confess they feel similarly -- and to suggest some new games I hadn't heard of. Joshua wrote : "Have you tried Ingenious? It's an amazing spacial game, involves making opportunities for other players as much as 
I spent most of last week driving around the Midwest, visiting colleges with my 17-year-old daughter. On every campus tour, we ran into families who, just like us, were looking for "the right fit" and who had traveled hundreds of miles to investigate.
Nobody called me chicken. Well, not exactly. But after my newspaper column this week, in which I revealed my fear of not being up to the task of making a panorama sugar egg, I received a number of emails from readers like the following note from Melinda, who encouraged me to take the plunge before next Easter: 
Claudine, a reader whose jpegs offer proof that it can be done. Some of her other handiwork is below, including this inside view (below left) and the bouquet of violets (right), which required a very steady hand. 
A reader has reminded me I forgot to mention The Cherry Ames Page, an incredible site loaded with facts and trivia gleaned from a close reading of Cherry books. If you're a fan, you'll have fun here. You'll learn, for instance, about "clues" from her childhood that may explain Cherry's motivation to become a nurse: "When they were in the third grade, one of Cherry's classmates had epileptic seizures. Cherry's class at school also included students who had hives. It is impossible to say how this early exposure to affliction may have influenced Cherry's eventual career choice."
After my newspaper column about the Cherry Ames novels, I received what seemed like a record number of emails from readers who also remembered and loved the WWII nursing heroine from childhood.
"On the last day of April, 1849 we began our journey to California." Sarah Royce set off from Iowa in a covered wagon with her husband and two-year-old daughter and kept a journal that described various encounters over the next few months with quicksand, stampedes, cholera and wrong turns in the desert that left the water supply very, very low. 
It turns out I'm not the only one who tosses at night, wondering where to find pants that fit and flatter. After my newspaper column on this topic today, I heard from dozens of readers with the same problem. Solutions vary: "$185? Are you out of your mind?" wrote Jan, a thrifty shopper who suggested an alternative to the pricy Vince sneaker pants I bought last week. Jan pays "$20 for Woolrich stretch khakis (also in black and navy) at vnp 加速. Simple, durable, fashionably blue-collar."
My dog Otto was very happy to move to northern California after he found out that dogs in this town are treated like royalty, with water bowls on the sidewalks in front of stores and retrievers in bandannas riding in the passenger seats of convertibles. This town has always been dog-happy, it turns out. A local history I've been reading reveals that upon incorporation a century ago, so many dogs were living here that the founding fathers relied on revenue from dog licenses to run the city while they were trying to devise a property tax system.
He's not what I would call a typically picky eater, but my husband has developed some unusual food aversions in recent years, the most inexplicable being a reluctance to eat pasta five nights out of six.