So I watched the first episode of Michael Symon's "Cook Like An Iron Chef" finally, and it was a very good show. Highly recommended. It's on The Cooking Channel, so it's just Michael Symon cooking.

But the one area I was a bit disappointed was a lack of him talking about process. He's faced with a pile of ingredients, how does he go from there to a dish concept?

It's upfront in my mind because I've been wanting to write a "process" post about thes lamb wraps for like a week and a half, because they went through so many changes in my head before I eventually made them.

It started, as it always does during CSA season, with the question: what do I need to use? The answer was savoy cabbage and cucumbers. The cabbage had daunted me a little with its giant, curly leaves. I'd thrown a few into a stirfry, and they're also a bit tough, toward the kale/collard end of the leaf spectrum. But they had huge, round, intact leaves. Which made me think of cabbage rolls.

So start with cabbage rolls. What do cabbage rolls have in them? Traditionally, ground meat and rice. Ground meat, I had. Hey, ground LAMB, I had. I love ground lamb, obviously. OK, so we're at lamb cabbage rolls. Well, what goes with ground lamb? Pine nuts. That's a classic pairing. Ground lamb, pine nuts, some aromatics. Then I had to look up how to make cabbage rolls - you start by cutting out the core and boiling the head of cabbage for ten minutes. OK.

That left the cucumber. Well, if I tweak the seasonings toward the Middle Eastern, which is easy to do with lamb and pine nuts, then I can make a cucumber yogurt sauce. Boom. Plans made.

Then the heat index hit 106. It was in the mid-nineties and muggy. I needed to make rice so that I could put it with my pork stomach leftovers for a lunch, so I shut up the apartment, turned on the rice cooker and the air conditioner, and let the fuckers fight it out while I ran some necessary errands. Boiling cabbage under those circumstances was right out.

So on my errands, the mind was working. What else has ground meat and aromatics? Asian style lettuce wraps. So the filling stays as is, but instead of boiling and wrapping and baking, we just wrap. OK. Except savoy cabbage is tough as hell. It needs to be softened somehow. But hey, the rice cooker was already warm, and I have two pots for it as the result of an unfortunate melting incident.

So when the rice finished, I swapped it out for some water and the steamer insert, packed the leaves in the steamer, and let them go, checking on them occasionally. Once they were at a wrappable lettucy consistency, I took them out. They smelled of cooked cabbage funk. Unpleasant. So I rinsed them off in a colander, which washed away a good chunk of the cooked cabbage funk while cooling them down and preventing them from cooking any farther.

While all this was going on, I was yanking all kinds of CSA produce to saute with the lamb. Whatever aromatics needed using. Fennel, a carrot, onion, garlic... it all got chopped fine and cooked in the pan with the lamb and my traditional mix of sumac and cumin. At the end, I added in the pine nuts that I'd toasted in the pan before I started the aromatics, and that part was done.

The cucumber yogurt sauce was just diced cucumbers in yogurt with some salt, some garlic, and cumin. Something I can make in my sleep.

At this point, I looked at what I had, and thought it was one element short. It had the meat, it had the sauce, it had the wrapper, but what vegetables I used had pretty much melted into the ground meat. Plus there was ground lamb and yogurt, both fairly rich and or creamy elements. That's when I remembered the cauliflower I'd pickled just to save it was probably ready at about a week and a half in the fridge.

Took some out, tasted it, and it was perfect. A bit vegetal, still very crunchy, and with a hint of curry powder and spice and a giant pile of vinegar brightness. Diced some up, put them between the meat and the yogurt, and the dish was done.