Novelty Cabbage

On a recent visit, our farmer friends gifted us with this baby cone-shaped cabbage (Caraflex). We had a good time browsing their seed catalogs -- on the novelty vegetable side, I'm pretty excited about "flower sprouts," a brussels/kale cross. You heard it here first!

One Hundred and Five Ways to Cook Cabbage

I was browsing through free Google ebooks, and I happened upon this gem. How to Cook Vegetables by Olive Green was published in 1909. It is exactly (sort of) the CSA cookbook I wish I had -- one that lists inexhaustibly many ways to cook that vegetable that you are so unspeakably tired of receiving in your weekly box. (My particular chore is to cook whatever is left at the end of the week -- that vegetable so unlovely that none of the five of us was inspired to want to eat it in six days of trying.)

Green (a pseudonym) is also the author of such classics as One Thousand Salads, What to Have for Breakfast, and The Spinster Book ("Yet a sensitive spinster is repeatedly astonished at finding her lover transformed into a fiend ...").

Here's a flavor of the recipes.

Coleslaw with Greek Yogurt Poppyseed Dressing

In celebration of an unseasonably warm Groundhog Day, what better than a barbecue?

The guests brought the meat, but I put together a potato salad and a coleslaw. (It worked out perfectly for us, but why, I wonder, do these quintessential summer side dishes rely on potatoes and cabbage, those most wintery of CSA staples?)

The potato salad was our old-fashioned Gourmet standard. (The secret is tossing the hot potato pieces with cider vinegar; this time I added lemon zest.)

I went looking for a good old-fashioned coleslaw recipe to go with it, but had some trouble finding one that wasn't too similar to potato salad. Mark Bittman doesn't dignify the standard in How to Cook Everything (he gives a spicy no-mayo coleslaw instead). But we make an awful lot of Asian slaws around here, so the Internet's multitude of "oil + vinegar = no-mayo coleslaw" recipes were Just Too Boring. (Incidentally, know who's really into coleslaw? Smitten Kitchen.)

AskMetafilter's discussion of no-mayo slaws suggested poppyseed dressing, and the yogurt was literally on the counter in front of me, being strained. (There are plenty of yogurt and Greek yogurt coleslaws out there; interestingly, most also use some mayonnaise.)

Here's what I put together:

Dressing
1/2 cup Greek yogurt (I actually used our own coop-made yogurt, strained)
3 tablespoons poppyseed salad dressing
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon brown sugar (optional; our yogurt is unsweetened and very tangy)
1 teaspoon celery seeds
Pinch of salt

The salad is shredded cabbage, carrots, and green onions, with a sprinkling of dried cranberries for extra sweetness.

Remarketing Borscht

Our farmers at Picadilly braved 18 inches of snow to bring us "borscht in a box" last week: beets, turnips, carrots, onions, cabbage, and potatoes.

We made borscht last year to use up our beets and cabbage and root vegetables, so I was pretty comfortable winging it as "vegetable soup that happens to contain beets and maybe is partially pureed" (how I make soup) this time.

But still, announcing "borscht" made the potluck guests uneasy. Housemates hovered in the kitchen to supervise what went into the pot. Some declared, bravely, their determination to try it. Another brought vodka.

We'd accumulated some beets and quite a bit of cabbage from previous weeks, so we made, um, sort of a lot. (Cf. the Canadian idiom "Cheap like borscht.")

Having a lot of unpopular magenta soup is not a plight unique to our refrigerator. In the Wall Street Journal, the borscht-making Gold family brainstorms new ways to sell their trademark project:

"It needs a totally new look to it," Steven Gold declares. "A sexy look." He advocates taking the word "borscht" out of the equation altogether. Call the product "Beet Smoothie," he suggests. "Power Beet Juice," offers Howard Gold.

And, in response, some (apparently earnest) suggestions on "making borscht cool again":

My key suggestion is to target babies and toddlers with a baby food (e.g. steamed and pureed beats) and a fun children’s borscht. This could be a very strategic move that makes beets and borscht a normal (and fun) part of childhood ... To target a very different audience than the Whole Foods crowd, I could imagine trying to get Borscht the official drink of an ultimate fighter or WWE wrestler. 

Jack, however, discovered the best marketing strategy for leftover borscht: combine it with cheese sauce.

Stuffed Lipstick Peppers

These stuffed peppers are our next entry in the cabbage-disguised-as-Mexican-food sweepstakes (see cabbage enchiladas, previously).

Enterprise Farm sent us a dozen "lipstick peppers" (amazing small sweet red peppers) in last week's box. These ones are stuffed with a mixture of rice, refried beans, leftover tomatillo salsa, cheese, and sauteed onions and, yup, cabbage.

Cabbage Enchiladas with Tomatillo Salsa

A major feature of life around here recently has been brainstorming ways to eat cabbage.

Inspired by some delicious (non-cabbage) enchiladas we'd had in New York, we had the idea of cabbage enchiladas. (Jack plumped for cabbage hard tacos, but was voted down.)

Strangely, we were not the first people to think of this. The key question about cabbage enchiladas turns out to be whether you put the cabbage on the inside or the outside. (Yes, I did briefly consider "both." That's how much cabbage we have.)

The recipe we went with was this one for Mexican Cabbage Rolls, substituting rice and beans for the ground beef to make them vegetarian. They were tasty (if a bit hard to cut), and if you got home late, you didn't get any. (No leftovers counts as a big win when we're cooking with cabbage.)

Serendipitously, Picadilly Farm sent us tomatillos today, along with a simple green salsa recipe, which made a tasty enchilada topping. Their recipe called for serrano or jalapeno peppers, but we used some roasted green chiles our friends Nathaniel and Ariel imported from New Mexico and left at potluck last week.

Simple Tomatillo Salsa

Husk and wash your tomatillos, and cut them into halves or quarters. Throw into the food processor with a garlic clove, a big handful of cilantro, and chiles to taste. Process until smoothish, and add salt and maybe lime juice to taste.

Veggie Slop, Two Ways

What with all the upheaval of moving a five-bedroom house in January, the farm share cooking around here hasn't been very exciting lately.

(What is very exciting around here? Our brand-new granite countertops, that's what.)

This is two examples of the very first thing I learned to cook reliably, which my very first roommates termed "veggies in a pan" (as in, "Did you make veggies in a pan again?"). Former housemate Liz brought us the less sophisticated -- but unarguably descriptive and inimitably co-opy -- name "veggie slop."

On the left, we have a vegetable curry, consisting largely of roasted farm share potatoes, beets, and carrots. There's also an eggplant, a zucchini, onions and garlic, a can of coconut milk, and Indian spices in there, all served over rice.

(Footnote: We seem to have lost our vegetable peeler in the move, so we ate the beets with the skins on. Is there anything wrong with that? If not, I sure feel silly about all the time I've spent peeling tiny CSA beets.)

On the right, a cabbage stir-fry, incorporating a whole head of cabbage, two smallish daikon radishes, yellow onion, and cilantro, with rice and Asian seasonings.

Lettuce Unwrapped

Learn from our mistakes, friends -- this is what happens when you get lax about your lettuce eating.

We cleaned out the fridge the other day and found five heads, plus a bunch of arugula and a giant Napa cabbage.

Dinner was all-you-can-eat lettuce wraps (unwrapped in the photograph), overstuffed with cooked shredded cabbage, Asian noodles, shredded carrot and daikon radish, and cilantro and mint, topped with house recipe peanut sauce.

Should you, too, be awash in leafy greens, a few resources:

• What to do with too much lettuce in the garden (including four ways to cook it!)
• Inspirational lettuce recipe photos on Tastespotting
• 10 Tasty Lettuce Recipes from a British veggie blog
• ... our first CSA pickup has so much lettuce I don't think I could possibly eat it all ... (Ask MetaFilter)
  

Cabbage, Two Ways

To the right, an Asian slaw harking back to the very first post on this blog, almost a year ago. (Oh, noes, don't go read it!) Chef's note: This time the cabbage decidedly did wilt, so while I called it "Asian slaw" the first day, the leftovers were definitely "kimchi."

To the left, a cabbage stir-fry, suggested in the comments on that first post, and now a part of our kitchen repertoire. This one also includes a medley of zucchini and summer squashes and cubes of tofu crisped in our new toaster oven.

Just out of the frame, the impromptu dinner guest who was extraordinarily gracious about being offered a meal of cabbage and cabbage, and the back porch that hosts that kind of informal company on many a long summer evening.

Peanut Sauce

How are we eating our greens recently? With peanut sauce.

With summer produce in full swing, gorgeous vegetables in our farm share, and a head of unloved cabbage in the crisper, I was reminded of Mark Bittman's 101 Simple Salads article. Searching for "cabbage" found me this:

20. Shred Napa cabbage and radishes. The dressing is roasted peanuts, lime juice, peanut or other oil, cilantro and fresh or dried chili, all whizzed in a blender. Deliciousness belies ease.

The cabbage wasn't Napa, and we didn't have any radishes, and we used peanut butter rather than peanuts, but you might have noticed that we pretty much just roll with that kind of thing around here.

(It was a tasty salad just as cabbage -- and yes, we served it to guests like that -- and even better with cucumbers and edamame added to the leftovers.)

Liz one-upped this, though, with her own peanut sauce, served with a lovely deconstructed-spring-roll salad.

Her peanut sauce recipe (peanut butter, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, maple syrup, soy sauce, garlic cloves, red pepper flakes, water if needed) shares not a single ingredient with Mark Bittman's, but similarly comes without any instructions or proportions.

The salad ingredients are finely chopped lettuce and celery, cold cooked rice noodles, defrosted frozen peas and Soycutash, and tofu blocks, topped with the peanut sauce.

(For those who prefer some instruction: Peanut sauce is better than 31 flavors of ice cream, Tyler Florence peanut sauce, CHOW peanut sauce, Epicurious spicy peanut sauce, and in our very own farm share newsletter.)

Winter Vegetable Borscht

We had beets, so it was time to make borscht. According to James Meek, this was not without geopolitical implications:

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

(The full article from the Guardian is worth reading for murder, intrigue, travelogue, etc.)


As usual, we got the basic recipe from Epicurious (Beet and Cabbage Borscht), following the reader suggestions to increase the proportion of vegetables to broth, to omit the tomatoes, to add apple cider vinegar as well as lemon juice, and not puree the soup at the end.

A local blogger's Ukrainian-style borscht recipe gave us the confidence to throw in all our accumulated winter CSA vegetables: beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips/rutabagas, onions.

(Caution: Housemate Liz insisted to us 1) that she doesn't like borscht, and 2) that borscht is white. These claims seemed so absurd that we were forced to research them. It turns out Liz finds our borscht delectable and that there is a Polish white borscht, which has no beets but which includes such delicious ingredients as "sausage cooking water, fat removed" and hard-boiled eggs.)

P.S. I also made Mark Bittman's whole-wheat muffins with a last, giant, slightly bruised CSA apple to accompany the copious borscht leftovers.

Mix-and-Match a Minestrone

Minestrone fulfills two of my major cooking needs: 1) you can make it entirely from ingredients you already have and 2) it doesn't require a recipe.

As long as there are some kind of tomatoes in the house, I will attempt to make minestrone. (And I haven't tried it yet, but I am not 100 percent sure that ketchup does not count as tomatoes.)

1. Cook your aromatics (any combination of onions, shallots, leeks, celery, and carrots) in oil in a large pot.

2. Add long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, turnips, parsnips).

3. Add some kind of tomatoes (fresh, canned, paste, jarred pasta sauce) and some kind of broth (from a can, box, cubes, or even just water).

4. Add quick-cooking vegetables (zucchini, corn, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards).

5. Add starches (cooked beans, cooked barley, uncooked rice, uncooked pasta).

The trick is really just to add the ingredients in approximate order of how much cooking time they need, so everything gets done at the same time.

Add whatever seasonings you like (I totally phoned it in this time with a jar of "Italian seasoning") and salt and pepper. Serve with grated cheese (traditionally Parmesan) on top.

This particular incarnation was leeks + celery + carrots + purple potatoes + butternut squash + canned chopped tomatoes + vegetable broth + cabbage + white beans + barley, and it made a serious dent in accumulated CSA vegetables.

(If fast and loose is not for you, here is a very serious approach to minestrone making, with beautiful photos.)

Empty Refrigerator Cabbage Stir-Fry

We pick up our share on Wednesdays, so finding things to eat on Tuesday can be a little rough.

Fortunately, this week we were armed with your comments suggesting additional things to do with cabbage. We ran with JamieLichtenstein's Asian-sounding stir-fry idea, and came up with this.

Empty Refrigerator Cabbage Stir-Fry

1 head of green cabbage
Kitchen staples: an onion, garlic, ginger, Asian chile sauce, soy sauce, cilantro

I sauteed an onion and a couple cloves of garlic, then threw in the chopped cabbage. There was too much to saute, so I added a little water and let the cabbage steam until it was pretty well cooked.

Then we tossed in some chopped ginger and dressed the whole mess with generously with Asian chile sauce and soy sauce and -- housemate Jack gets full credit for this -- a secret ingredient. (I'm pretty sure you'd get similar results from a bouillon cube, if, bless you, yours isn't the kind of house that has five-year-old British condiments in the back of the fridge.)

Then we stirred in some chopped cilantro in and served it over white rice. No leftovers.

P.S. I was a little skeptical about it coming together while I was cooking, but let me just say, I've never before had housemates arrive home while I was cooking cabbage and say "That smells delicious!"

First blog post... adventures with cabbage

Our houseful of hungry mostly-vegetarians makes short work of most of our farm share items. This is not exactly the case with cabbage, which we accumulated to an alarming quantity during July and August. At our house meeting on The Cabbage Problem, kimchi was suggested as a solution. None of us had any idea how to make it, so we asked Mark Bittman, the New York Times food writer.

(Note: I am a total Mark Bittman fangirl.)

It turns out that Mark has written about kimchi quite a few times—one article back in 1996, then again in 2000, then again in his vegetarian cookbook (2007). He differentiates between aged, pickled "winter kimchi" and fresh "seasonal kimchi," which you can make and eat on the same day. We went for the latter. Because we cook recklessly around here—my problems with authority manifest as an inability to follow a recipe and I'm too impatient to measure—we combined elements of all the recipes.

I didn't realize this until I'd finished making it, but "seasonal kimchi" is essentially Asian slaw. If I'd known I was just making coleslaw (and not trying to recreate a particular alchemy that magically transforms cabbage to kimchi), I would have been even more fast and loose with the recipes. It is, however, a delicious Asian slaw. I made it twice, once with red cabbage and then again with green cabbage.

Our final house recipe is, approximately: One head of cabbage, coarsely chopped. Add to it one bunch of scallions and a couple cucumbers, chopped. Add lots of garlic and ginger, then some chiles (fresh or dried), then soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sugar, and salt to taste.

A couple notes on the process and results: Mark told us to wilt the cabbage by salting it and letting it stand for a few hours before making the kimchi. In our experience, however, farm share cabbage is indestructible and does not wilt. (In fact, the last serving of our first batch of kimchi got lost in the back of the fridge for about three weeks, and though I threw it out, the cabbage was just as firm as ever.) Additionally, our kimchi was distinctly not-red (even when we used red cabbage), which lost it some authenticity votes here. (A splinter group of housemates actually lobbied for adding red food coloring.)

For the third cabbage, rather than make yet another batch of kimchi, we tried Bobby Flay's Red Cabbage Slaw. You chop up the cabbage and make a dressing in the blender; chill and it's done. I used half the cabbage to make one batch in the morning, then, by popular demand, used the second half to make another batch that night.

Any ideas for the one last head of green cabbage still hanging out in our fridge?