Sweet and sour purple cabbage

I went and did it again - bought more cabbage. This time, at least, it was purple, which is mildly exciting. And when I added enough bacon, it was actually quite tasty. I recommend this dish, because it doesn't taste like cabbage, it tastes like sweet and sour bacon, and its PURPLE! Not Ed-rating, since he isn't in Amherst, but I did deem the dish tasty enough to bring another batch to the training camp last weekend, where it was generally agreed that 1) bacon is delicious, and 2) this didn't taste like cabbage. So with that ringing recommendation, here's the recipe!

Sweet and sour purple cabbage
Made enough for 12 modest servings

1 head of purple cabbage
1/2lb bacon
1 onion
~1/4C lemon juice, or just juice from a lemon
~2tbs white sugar
salt to taste
cilantro (optional)

I'm not sure the cabbage has to be purple, but at least that'll make the dish pretty, and it's not like purple cabbages cost more than the green kind. I also learned the lesson that buying the $2.50/lb bacon is not necessarily a good thing. It rendered out a WHOLE lot of fat. I should find a use for bacon grease... popovers?

Dice up the bacon, and throw that in a large frying pan. Render out most of the grease, and pour most of it off. Dice the onion, and cook that down for a while, until it is soft and beginning to taste sweet. Chop the cabbage into little chunks, and put that in the pan. Add the lemon juice and sugar and some salt (a couple pinches). Cover, and let it cook for a while. Take the cover off, stir around, and let it cook some more. It's done when the cabbage is soft and silky. Add the chopped cilantro, and serve warm or cold.

Dessert crepes

When Chris was here for the marathon, I made crepes for dessert one night. So delicious! We filled them with maple syrup-sweetened ricotta, raspberries, and maple whipped cream, and I think we were all pretty much in heaven. It helped that we'd also had delicious fish tacos for dinner, so it was hard to go wrong, but I'll be making these again. The recipe is from Dave Lieberman's website, but it seems pretty standard.



Crepes
Made about 10 pancakes
3/4C flour
1tsp salt
1C milk (I used whole)
2 eggs
2 tbs sugar
1tbs melted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Put everything in a bowl and whisk. Heat some butter in a nonstick frying pan, and pour a small amount (~1/4C worth of batter) of batter into the pan, and swirl the pan around to spread out the batter. Cook for a few minutes on that side, until the bubbles on top aren't filling in after popping. Flip the crepe, and cook another minute or so on that side. Eat immediately!



Maple-sweetened ricotta:
Made ~1.5C
2C whole milk
~2tbs lemon juice
pinch of salt
1 tbs maple syrup

Put the milk and salt in a saucepan, and heat until just before it starts to simmer. Remove from heat and add the lemon juice, stir that around. It should immediately start to curdle. Let it sit there curdling for 10 minutes or so, and then pour it through a cheesecloth into a straining device. Let that sit and drain for 5-10 minutes. Put it into a bowl, and stir in the maple syrup. If you want the ricotta harder packed, you can squeeze it; I prefer a loose, gloopy cheese for filling crepes.

The raspberries were just frozen raspberries, microwaved to thaw, and to get some juice from them. The maple whipped cream was cream whipped with maybe 1tbs of maple syrup.

Put some of everything inside your crepe, and roll it up. Try not to drool, because these are delicious!

Sandwiches

Last week, I decided that I didn't feel like "cooking", so I would just buy sandwich ingredients and eat sandwiches all week. At the time, that seemed like a good idea, but then I remembered that I don't actually like sandwiches. If there is melted cheese involved, that's ok, but cold cuts sort of turn my stomach. I guess if I'd not started making grilled cheeses, it would have been some sort of horrid sandwich-diet. Ugh. I discovered, in buying the ingredients I felt were necessary to make a good sandwich, that sandwiches cost a lot of money. I made the bread, but buying deli turkey, bacon, basil (couldn't bear to cut off Barry's leaves... he isn't doing too well to begin with, I'm hoping that leaving him with all his photosynthesizing bits will help him out), sprouts, hummus, mustard, avocado, cheese, and salad ingredients - that was probably my most expensive run at the grocery store I've made in the last couple months. Yikes. How do people afford to eat sandwiches?

So after looking at that bill, I figured I damn well better enjoy my sandwiches. Unfortunately, it just wasn't going to happen. So once I ran out of turkey and bacon and avocado (that only took two days), it was back to grilled cheeses. And broiled cheese-on-bread. Melted cheese is delicious. Add bacon, and you have a double deliciousness!


The first few bites were delicious - turkey, bacon, avocado, sprouts, basil leaves, hummus on one piece of bread, yummy mustard on the other side, roasted red peppers - it was a far cry from those bland bread-and-ham sandwiches that I ate every. single. day. of highschool. I think that's where my hatred of sandwiches dates back to. I keep trying to make myself like them... melted cheese helps.


Next up was grilled cheese. Basically, I had a cold sandwich for lunch and melted cheese deliciousness for dinner - sort of like a reward for eating the cold sandwich. These photos don't do justice to how delicious that grilled cheese sandwich actually was. Cheese (a mix of cheddar and mozzarella in this case), basil, bacon, and bread.

By the end of the week, I was going for full-blown open-faced bread-and-cheese. Far superior to sandwiches. This is getting closer to pizza, which is delicious.
This one finished off my cheese stash - basil and sundried tomatoes underneath some cheddar and shredded mozzarella.

Next time, it'll be a week of pizza, not sandwiches. I had to try, I guess. At least I seem to be over the gag reflex.

Cabbage wedges

I don't usually buy cabbage, because there is just so damn much of it once you buy it, and because it doesn't actually taste that good. But, it's cheap, and relatively nutritious, and I was at Whole Foods (aka Whole paycheck), and needed more veggies without breaking the bank, so I bought a cabbage. One of the relatively small, light green ones.

The first thing I tried was stir frying it with a bunch of other veggies, but that wasn't exactly exciting. And that only used up half of it. I looked around at recipes for cabbage, but it seems that usually it's used as a filler, no surprise there. So I decided to go my usual vegetable route - apply heat, olive oil, and salt, and see what happens. What happened was actually pretty good, with brown bits and flavor. I'm not sure I'd recommend this for anything other than using up cabbage, because while it tasted perfectly fine, it was hardly exciting. Maybe if you had a delicious sauce to pour over the top, or if you were on some sort of cabbage diet. Or if you just really like cabbage - the overall flavor was "cabbage", which actually reminded me of most brassicaceae, like brussels sprouts, which I love. So, maybe I'll try this again, we'll see...

Cabbage Wedges
Made 4 wedges, depending on how much you like cabbage that would be good for 1 - 4 people
1/2 head of savoy cabbage
Olive oil
Kosher salt

Cut the cabbage into wedges, leaving the stem on, to hold the leaves together. Heat some oil in a frying pan, medium-ish heat. Put in the cabbage wedges, and salt the upper side. Let them sit there for about five minutes, until they're looking nice and golden brown on the bottom. Flip, and salt the upper side (which hasn't had salt yet). Let them sit there for another 5-10 minutes, until the stems are nice and soft if you poke them with a fork. You can flip and keep cooking if you like them to be softer, I guess I like my veggies to have a bit of a bite.

Serve as is, or with a sauce of some sort. The flavor is pretty neutral, and the texture is fairly smooth, with some crunch. Not actually all that bad, considering that it's cabbage...

I guess I was feeling Irish today. Or something like that.