Beef Rouladen with Spätzle and Red Cabbage

Beef rouladen is a wonderful German comfort food dish and one of my favorite winter dishes.  I got the recipe years ago from a great German restaurant we used to go to all the time in San Francisco called Suppenküche and have tweaked ita little.  I made it for a dinner party and it’s fairly easy because you can make a lot of it the day before.  You sauté bacon pieces with onions and shredded carrots and mix with chopped dill pickles (which sounds weird, but it’s really good).  I ask the butcher to cut top round pieces into thin slices and cut those in half and lay them out on a piece of plastic wrap for easy clean up.  Then I take Dijon mustard and put a dollop on each piece and use a pastry brush and smear it all over.  Then take some of the filling and put it on one end of the beef, roll it and secure with a toothpick.  After you get all of them rolled, you sauté the beef in a Dutch oven and brown them all over and then add tomato paste, red wine and beef broth and braise them in the oven for 2 hours and they become nice and tender.  I remove the beef to a serving platter and make a slurry of corn starch and water and quickly mix it into the sauce to make it a little thicker.  You can serve it over wide egg noodles, but I like to make spätzle (translates to “little sparrow”) which is a German egg noodle and it is made with a special spätzle grater that has a hopper that you swipe across to allow the noodle batter to drop in gently boiling salted water.  You can also use a large slotted colander. They take about 3-4 minutes to cook and then you shock them in an ice bath to stop the cooking.  Drain them and allow to dry off a little, toss with a little olive  oil and you can store them overnight if you want to make ahead of time.  Just before you serving, sauté them in a skillet with butter over medium high heat until lightly browned and sprinkle with some chopped parsley for a little color.  I also made red cabbage which I also love and it is slightly sweet and a little sour and it has caramelized onions, apples, cranberry sauce, apple juice, cider vinegar, sugar, cloves, and cinnamon sticks that you cook for an hour until it all melds together for a sweet and sour red cabbage.  You can also make the cabbage the day before.  Click here for the recipe….