Tag: cabbage

Categories
The Book Vegetables

188. Crisp Sautéed Cabbage with Caraway p.527

The recipe does not appear to appear online

You know how it goes. You get ambitious and decide to make coleslaw for that barbecue you’re hosting, and think that you should buy a big cabbage because so many are coming to this to-do. You get home and start slicing the cabbage only to discover that half of it fills the biggest bowl in the house, so the remainder goes into the crisper to quietly decompose until you can feel good about throwing it away. This recipe is the solution to your cabbage problem.

The Good: This recipe takes 20 minutes start to finish, and it gets rid of that cabbage. Slicing the cabbage very finely (use a mandolin if you have one) and sautéing it quickly doesn’t give it time to develop that sulpherous stink most people would rather avoid. It’s cooked with onion, caraway seeds, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end. The carraway worked really nicely with the cabbage, it’s not a spice I think of using often, and I like to see it on things other than bread. My dining companion really liked this dish a lot, it appealed to her Ukranian roots, and I have to agree. An underappreciated virtue of cabbage is that it’s exceedingly inexpensive. What with the price of food these days, why not integrate more cabbage into your diet and save your shekels.

The Bad: There weren’t many bad points about this recipe, it’s very simple, with no surprises. The world is full of reflexive cabbage haters, if you’re one of them this dish won’t change your mind, but for the rest of us I thought it was a winner. It could have used some colour though, shredded carrot comes to mind.

The Verdict: This is a recipe I’d be willing to go out and buy a brand new cabbage for. It’s got a definite place on the menu at our next pierogi party (we probably have three a year, not counting the nights we just have them for dinner). I wasn’t expecting much from such a simple recipe, but it really worked for me.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

85. Bok Choy with Soy Sauce and Butter p.524

The recipe

This is about as simple as side dishes get. Just fry up some bok choy, toss on a mixture of water, soy, oyster sauce, and butter, cook for a minute or two, then eat. I prefer baby bok choy to the gargantuan full grown versions. They don’t taste much different, but I like the finer texture of the smaller ones. Full sized bok choy also leave you with the cabbage and celery conundrum of what to do with the rest of these enormous vegetables?

Bok choy is a prototypically Chinese vegetable, and it’s almost always prepared with that in mind. I don’t think I’ve had it any way but stir fried with some vaguely Asian flavourings tossed at it. I wonder if bok choy really has an affinity for soy sauce, or if it’s just the case that no one has ever tasted it without it? While this preparation isn’t innovative, it is quite tasty.

I liked that this dish is simple, and uses ingredients you probably have on hand. I’m not actually sure that most people have oyster sauce on hand. But, a geometric expansion of condiments is squeezing me out of my fridge, so oyster sauce was no problem to find.

This recipe was reliable, easy, and very quick. Bok choy looks great on a plate, and has a unique and appealingly mild flavour. This is a great side dish, and it could even see myself making these as dinner-for-one after an exhausting day.

Categories
Sandwiches & Pizzas The Book

74. Lemon Coleslaw p.193

The recipe

This coleslaw is meant to be served as part of Shredded Pork and Lemon Coelsaw Sandwiches (p.192). I made the slaw on it’s own though. This dish is found in the Sandwiches and Pizzas section of The Book, and this is the first recipe I’ve done from that section. So, let’s open Sandwiches and Pizzas with a coleslaw.

It was a very light, cooling, and fresh slaw. It wasn’t weighed down by a gallon of dressing, and the lemon flavours made the whole dish taste bright and clear. On the other hand, the cabbage retained all of it’s crispness. I like crunchy cabbage in a slaw, but this was going a little too far. My jaw hurt from the effort.

The dish is as simple as you could ask for. Whisk together a bit of sour cream, mayo, lemon zest and juice, water, sugar, salt, and pepper. Stir in sliced cabbage, grated carrots, scallions, and parsley. Let the whole thing sit in the fridge for an hour and serve. The hour in the fridge is supposed to give the sugar and salt in the dressing time to draw moisture out of the veg and wilt them a bit. But, after an hour the cabbage was just a tough as ever.

I sliced my cabbage as thinly as I could with a chef’s knife, and ended up with good looking pieces of cabbage. Maybe I sliced it too thickly for the one hour to be sufficient. If I’d used a mandolin to get narrower slices things might have worked out better. Alternately more time would have done the trick. I had some leftovers the next day for lunch and the texture was much better. Some of the freshness of the lemon had faded, but the whole salad had mellowed, and the cabbage still had a crisp bite without causing jaw cramps.

There were a lot of things to like about this slaw, but it needs some refinements. If I were to make it again I’d toss the dressing on to the sliced cabbage the night before, then add the carrots, scallions, parsley and a little refreshing squeeze of lemon an hour before I wanted to serve it. The flavours are really clean, but a bit unidimensional. If I were to make it again I’d add some sliced fennel into the mix. I really appreciated that the recipe allowed the cabbage to be front and centre. So many slaws are downed with goopy dressings in an attempt to hide the fact that you might be eating cabbage, so this was a refreshing change.