BakeandCut

Thai styled cabbage

Cabbage, what do I know about cabbage.

1: I know that the only way my mum cooked it was boiled, and then boiled some more. It was not her specialty. And not very nice, until the leftovers went into bubble and squeak. And the only reasons there were leftovers, was because no one liked over boiled cabbage, apart from my dad, who would eat anything.

2: It is home to snails and slugs, they love it. They can devour it very fast. And if you do not spray your vegetables that is what you will find living in between the leaves and my parents did not. So on top of the over boiling my mum did, we would also find the part of an over boiled slug or snail. And she wondered why cabbage was not a big hit in our household.

3: That Capitan Cook learned from the German sailors that sauerkraut was full of vitamin C and was the best thing to keep free of scurvy on long voyages.

4: I do not like sauerkraut, as much as I try to eat it.

5:European Cabbage White butterfly loves it.

So these are some of the things that I know about cabbage. I do not boil cabbage when I cook it now, I wonder why.

The first time I tasted coleslaw was in my mid-teens after I had moved out of home and went to KFC with a boyfriend. I never thought that cabbage could taste so good as coleslaw. So that’s how I started making cabbage salads. By the way, I have not eaten KFC for many years now.

I steam it, I have stuffed it, I have juiced it, I have saladed it. I have roasted it. I have blended it.
And to think my grandfather was a chef, my mother was a cook. That’s how she earned a living for herself when she immigrated to New Zealand.

So when I make a cabbage salad or coleslaw I look for something a bit different these days.

It is a food I always have in the fridge, I really like it just steamed and eaten with potatoes and in soup.

It is great to eat in summer and great to eat in winter. And there always some sauerkraut in the cupboard for my husband who loves it and he was the one that introduced me to sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is a great way to keep cabbage for winter when you can not get it fresh and of course fermenting it you get more of the health-giving benefits of it.
I know many dieters eat cabbage, wasn’t there the famous cabbage soup diet going around at one stage?

Now back to bubble and squeak, that was something we did eat a lot of when growing up. We used to grow our own cabbage and potatoes and the was always leftovers in our house. Sometimes I wonder if mum deliberately cooked too much just for the leftovers. She used to make the bubble and squeak in an enameled cast iron fry pan. And the fat she used was mutton fat. We used to kill our meat and keep all the fat from the sheep we killed and rendered it down, and that’s what we fried all our food in.

Anyway, back to my salad. I hope you enjoy it more than over boiled cabbage.

 

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