Ravings of a Textual Deviant

This is not the Top Secret Family Cabbage Recipe that I acquired from my ex-coworker, but it does feature a similarly heavy dose of starch, and is likewise really not kosher or vegetarian.

The base of this dish is mashed potatoes. I prefer to make mashed potatoes by boiling cubed red potatoes in salted water until they’re soft, then adding in butter and either milk or fat-free Greek yogurt as part of the actual mashing process. If you’re feeling ambitious, you could also add in chives, or tarragon, or whatever herbs you prefer. Bear in mind that the potatoes are the base, however, not the main attraction.

Next, I diced an onion and sliced up the cabbage (I had one small head each of purple and green cabbage, which was a very nice touch, I thought.) If I’d had a leek to hand, it would’ve gone in as well. Over medium heat, I sauteed the onion in olive oil until it was just starting to brown, and then added in the shredded cabbage. Don’t worry if you think you’ve got way too much cabbage when start; it cooks down a lot. I kept the additional flavorings pretty light, only adding black pepper and caraway, and deglazing the pan with water when the fond started to develop.

To finish it off, I put some sliced Canadian bacon on top of the cabbage, and let it warm up. Had I been paying more attention, I would have cut it up a bit more and started it with the onions…but I was distracted, and I’m please to have remembered it at all. You could probably easily substitute ham, or sausage, or any other pork or faux-pork product you prefer (turkey-based, tofu based, etc.) here as well, so long as it is fully cooked by the time you’re done.

To serve, first put down a layer of mashed potatoes. Add the cabbage and Canadian bacon right on top of the potatoes. Sprinkle some shredded cheddar cheese over the top, stir the lot of it together, and devour.

Over the weekend, I was simultaneously making tomato sauce from scratch and getting the yellow beans ready to blanch and freeze. I had chopped onions and tomatoes everywhere, when I realized that I didn’t have any containers to put the beans in to freeze them.

Fortunately, I did need to bring a side dish to a gathering that evening.

I cut the yellow beans into bite-sized pieces, and boiled them just enough to get rid of that fuzzy/sticky, spilled-beer-on-industrial-carpet feel that they have when raw. I sauteed up some of my onion and garlic in a generous amount of olive oil, and added in the cooked beans. Next into the pan were chopped tomates, followed up by some oregano. Not only did they make a very good side dish, the leftovers were the next day’s main dush, reheated with cooked chicken and corkscrew pasta stirred in.

As for homemade tomato sauce, there are millions of ways to go about it, but they all start with a couple of pounds of chopped tomatoes slowly simmered until they start to fall apart. I usually scoop most of the tomato base into a blender and puree it, then return it to the pot; I like my sauce a little bit chunky. Sauteed onion and garlic went into the pot, along with some red wine vinegar and red wine. After the alcohol cooked out, I reduced the heat to a low simmer and stirred in oregano, basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary, black pepper, salt, and anchovy paste. 20 minutes later, I stirred in a small can of tomato paste and some truffle oil. After that, another 10-15 minutes over medium-low heat, to let the flavors come together. I was feeling lazy, so I skipped the eggplant and squash, but when I ladled the sauce over the pasta, I didn’t find myself missing anything.

So, I still haven’t done anything with the beets from week 1 (and really need to at this point). I did use the rest of the cabbage and the green pepper, though, in the following manner:

Saute one small chopped onion and chopped green pepper in olive oil. Optionally, add in some cubed bacon or pancetta. Add shredded cabbage and caraway or fennel. When the cabbage is cooked, deglaze the pan with red wine vinegar.

The zucchini, yellow squash, another green pepper and one of the eggplants went into a batch of spaghetti sauce, along with half of the mushrooms. The other half of the mushrooms went into an asparagus, mushroom, and crab surimi risotto that got stuffed into the remaining green pepper and a couple of red pepppers, then topped with a little bit of cheese and baked.

Still untouched from week 2 are one small eggplant, the napa cabbage, and two cucumbers.

Still left over from Week 1 - three small beets, half a head of cabbage, half a head of lettuce, and a small green bell pepper. I am of a mind to make colcannon with the remaining cabbage, and roast the beets with rosemary and olive oil (small portion won’t matter, as spouse doesn’t care for beets anyway), and serve the lot of it with some sort of fish.

Speaking of which, remind me to post the fish taco recipe sometime.

New for Week 2 - two more small green bell peppers, a head of napa cabbage, two miniature Asian eggplants (bright, bright purple!) three small cucumbers, a zucchini, a pomegranate-shaped yellow squash, a handful of cherry tomatoes, fresh basil and parsley, and a hefty bag of mushrooms.

I think that the zucchini, squash, and peppers are going to end up in a chunky vegetable tomato sauce over pasta, and I’ll try something from my relatively-new Indian cookbook for the eggplant and napa cabbage. The cucumbers and tomatoes will probably end up in a salad with last week’s lettuce and some marinated mozzarella. And maybe I’ll break out the food processor for some homemade pesto sauce, using the herbs.

After an interesting day at work, I decided to fall back to one of my favorite, simple meals.

It started with a basic green salad, using the smaller head of lettuce and both cucumbers from the CSA box, as well as some tiny tomatoes I had picked up at the farmer’s market. (Hey, it’s a quick solution for adding vegetables to a meal.)

I had some refrigerated pierogi from Trader Joe’s, which only needed a few minutes in boiling water, and a sauce. For that, I sliced up the mushrooms from the CSA share and sauteed them in a mix of butter and olive oil on medium heat. While they were cooking, I chopped up some crab-flavored surimi (usually I prefer lobster-flavored for this dish, but both are good, or you can skip it altogether and add extra mushroomsfor a vegetarian version) and added it to the mushrooms. As soon as it was warm and blended, I deglazed the pan with vermouth, and let the alcohol cook off. I added some alfredo sauce from a jar, stirred everything together, and reduced the heat. Finally, I stirred in some dried parsley. The sauce thickens up very nicely on low heat, and is also good on pasta, mashed potatoes, and rice.

I had an eggplant and some spinach already in the fridge that I needed to use, and pile of zucchini. I wanted something with a lot of vegetables in it, but didn’t feel like fussing around with a ratatouille or lasgana noodles.

So I skipped the noodles. I sprayed down my usual lasagna pan with olive oil, and got to work.

I sliced the eggplant and zucchini into planks, sliced up an onion and some mushrooms, and pulled a bag of baby spinach out of the fridge. Using the veggie planks in place of noodles, I layered everything with tomato sauce from a jar (told you I was feeling lazy) and some various odds and ends of cheese; fresh mozzarella, shredded parmesan, and an Italian four-cheese blend. (I seem to end up with a lot of odds and ends of cheese, but never enough of any one kind to use up on its own.) I covered the pan with foil to keep the cheese and onion on top from burning.

It went into the oven at 375 degrees (Farenheit; I’m an American, after all, and we can’t be bothered with that metric nonsense) and it’s there even as I type. After 40 minutes of baking time, I’ll take the foil off and let the top get brown and bubbly. Maybe by then, I’ll have gotten of my lazy behind and cooked up some gnocchi or whatever to go under it.

And I still need to figure out what to do with a rather substantial amount of cabbage.

ETA: Shouldn’t have skipped the noodles. This tasted pretty good, but was very watery.

ETA: I ended up putting the lot of it in a blender with some tomato paste and canned, diced tomates. After several hours on low heat and the addition of some Italian sausage meatballs, it turned out very well indeed…sort of, but not quite, a Bolognese.

I had three yellow summer squashes of various configurations, and no idea what to do with them. After thirty minutes of looking through cookbooks ranging from Janet Kessel Fletcher’s Fresh from the Farmer’s Market to Dale Carson’s New Native American Cooking, I still didn’t have a recipe that struck my fancy.

I decided to wing it. I started off my sauteeing chopped onions in olive oil, for the sake of making a decision that left me a lot of options. As soon as the onions started to turn translucent, I added some cubed pancetta. I cut the squashes into something approximating bite-sized cubes, and added them to the pan after the onions started to turn golden-brown. The squash took a while to cook down and soften up, but when it did, I added some dried basil and oregano, then deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine.

To go with it, Spouse roasted a chicken on top of some potatoes, onions and carrots, so we ended up with lots of veggies, and I suspect I am going to be making chicken soup in the not-too-distant future.

Last night’s dinner was sauteed mixed greens from the CSA box, with duck, water chestnuts, and mushrooms.

The beet greens from the box were not in great shape (it’s been a very buggy season so far here, what with all the rain), but there was plenty of cabbage to fill out. I cut the greens into fairly large shreds, as they shrink down a lot when you cook them. The pickup point for the CSA produce is a lovely little neighborhood market that had some duck breast, which I always have a hard time turning down. Half a pound was fine for two servings, with a little bit left over. I also had some shiitake mushrooms that predated the CSA muchrooms, so I sliced them up.

I started the mushrooms in the pan first with a little bit of olive oil, then added the duck, cut into bite-size chunks. I probably should have added the greens earlier than I did, as the cabbage was fairly robust stuff, but it came out quite edible despite that. The diced water chestnuts went in next, and as soon as they were warm, I poured some of Trader Joe’s Five-Spice sauce over the lot. The saute went over plain rice, and was absolutely delicious.

Before I knew I could get the duck, I was planning to do this as a vegetarian dish with tofu. Next time, perhaps. I still have a lot of cabbage left over.

Yesterday, Spouse picked up our first CSA distribution. We have one head each of two different kinds of lettuce, the most beautiful head of cabbage I have ever seen, a small bunch of beets with the greens still on them, two small cucumbers, an assortment of five small summer squashes, and about half a pound of mushrooms. I was hoping for tomatoes, too, but it was not to be.

I see salad (lots of salad) in our future, probably some Asian-style sauteed cabbage and beet greens, and maybe mixed squash gratin if I can find or invent a recipe.

I’m in a mood to do some cooking and baking this weekend…anything could happen!