I wasn’t going to post on this dinner, as it’s really unpreposessing-looking (brown meat, brownish-yellow cabbage, brown pickle – all we needed was a reddish-brown dal to make the plate truly unappetizing). And I’ve already talked about the pork stewed with ginger, chiles and rai masala (a regular dish in our meal rotation). But I don’t believe I’ve told you about this cabbage dish, which is easy to make and amazingly good, especially with a side of yogurt and a good Indian pickle. Despite its looks, it’s worth trying – sweet and a little spicy, with a lingering fennel note and just a hint of bitterness from the fenugreek. I generally make it a little differently each time, depending on my mood and what we’re serving it with. This is the version I made last night.

Buttery Cabbage with Fennel and Green Chile

Loosely adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen

• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 onion, sliced
• 1 small green cabbage, cored and finely sliced
• 1/2 tsp cumin seed
• 1/4 tsp mustard seed
• 1/2 tsp fennel seed
• 5 fenugreek seeds
• a clove or two of garlic, chopped
• 1 green chile (we use serranos), chopped
• 1 nugget fresh ginger, chopped
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• kosher salt
• 1 Tbsp butter
• pinch garam masala
• juice of half a lemon

Heat the oil in a large skillet (one that has a well-fitting lid) and add the cumin, mustard, fennel and fenugreek seeds. When they have begun to toast, add the onion and saute until it softens. Add the garlic, ginger, turmeric and chile and cook for a minute or two, then dump in all the shredded cabbage (this is why you needed a large skillet). Saute until the cabbage wilts and combines with the onion and spices, then add some salt and the butter. Stir it all up as the butter melts, then put in a splash of water, cover the pan and lower the heat. Let it simmer 15-30 minutes, checking occasionally to make sure it hasn’t boiled dry.  Then take off the lid and slowly saute again, stirring frequently, so that the liquid boils off and the onion and cabbage caramelize a bit – another 15-30 minutes. Sprinkle in the garam masala and lemon juice, taste for salt, and serve.

I’ve always been a big fan of fish tacos, and tend to order them any time I see them as long as they’re not deep-fried (not that I have anything against fried fish, but I prefer it outside of a taco). We recently had some fantastic halibut tacos out at Skagit’s Own Fish Market, grilled with a spicy rub and liberally dressed with tomato salsa and fresh cucumber. Then there was the taco, also halibut I think, at Fred’s Rivertown Alehouse in Snohomish, which was topped with cabbage and tartar sauce and came with some really excellent beans and rice. At this point I really wanted to make some of my own, to keep the streak going. We picked up some nice looking ling cod and a pack of fresh tortillas and thought about topping options.

This year I’ve been growing tomatillos for the first time. We got a couple of plants from the high school greenhouse of a variety I’d never seen before, just labeled “purple tomatillos.” With the hot weather we’ve finally been having, the plants have started bearing like crazy, and the fruits are, indeed, purple. I only had a few mature tomatillos, but decided to try whipping them up into a green (or purple) salsa to go with our fish tacos.

I husked and rinsed the tomatillos, then put them on a cast iron griddle alongside a jalapeno pepper. I toasted them until they softened and blistered, let them cool, then packed all of it into a blender with a few cloves of garlic, a handful of cilantro, and a glug of olive oil.

It turned out really well. To my relief, the tomatillos are really only purple on the outside, so the final salsa was still mainly green, which is less alarming. And the salsa was sweet and mildly spicy, just perfect for the fish.

For the rest of the prep, I dusted the cod with a bit of salt, New Mexico chile powder, and ground cumin, then grilled it until it was just cooked through. I shredded a big of green cabbage and tossed it with salt and some white vinegar, and we toasted fresh corn tortillas on the grill.

With a dollop of good sour cream (and a cold beer alongside) the tacos were about perfect. I could eat these every week, easily.

I’ve been eager to get to work with some of the beans I picked up at the Rancho Gordo booth in San Francisco, and I finally got my chance this week. I decided to start with the ones I was most curious about: the Christmas limas, which the packaging claims taste of chestnuts. Plus they’re all kinds of pretty.

I picked a recipe out of my newly acquired copy of Heirloom Beans, for Christmas limas with cabbage and pork chops. I did my new favorite brine soak, but otherwise followed the recipe fairly closely. The beans cook in an aromatic broth of bacon, garlic, bay and ancho chile, and Savoy cabbage is wilted in with them at the last moment. The pork chops are very straightforwardly seared, then finished in the oven (we thought about hauling out the grill but ran out of time that day).

The final product was tasty. A touch smokey and spicy, with a nice depth of flavor. I can’t say I picked up on the chestnut thing with the beans, and their heavily starchy texture got a little tiresome when I ate a bowlful for lunch later in the week, but they did go wonderfully with the pork. I have half a pound of the beans left, which I will happily use for something, but I’m not sure I’ll buy this variety again.

We did make the suggested relish to go with this, just a bowl of finely diced Asian pear with lemon juice and fresh chives, and it was interesting. I thought it tasted like apples chopped on an onion-tainted cutting board, but Jon quite liked it and ate it all.

Carneros Inn Christmas Limas with Pork Chops and Cabbage

Adapted from Heirloom Beans by Steve Sando

The Beans:

• 1/2 pound Christmas lima beans
• 3 slices thick bacon, diced
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 small carrot, small dice
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 ancho chile, seeded and torn up
• 5 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• salt and pepper
• 1/2 head Savoy cabbage, shredded

The Relish:

• 1 asian pear, finely diced
• 1 Tbsp fresh chives, chopped
• 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

The Pork:

• 2-4 bone-in pork chops

Soak the beans overnight or at least six hours ahead of time in salted water. Drain and rinse before cooking.

Fry the chopped bacon in a soup pot. Add the olive oil, carrot and onion and saute until softened, then add the garlic, chile, bay and the beans, and add water to top the ingredients by an inch or so. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer, partially cover and let cook about an hour. When the beans are done, add salt and pepper to taste, and add the shredded cabbage to the pot. Cook until the cabbage is just wilted.

To make the relish, combine the diced pear with chives and lemon juice. That’s it!

Preheat the oven to 400°. Salt and pepper the pork chops. Sear them in a teaspoon of olive oil in a heavy iron skillet, 3 minutes a side. Put in the oven and cook just a few more minutes, until the thickest part of the chops have reached 140°. Serve with the beans and relish.

We have been braising fiends this year, and we’ve begun to make inroads on some of our larger roasts, which means leftovers. Of course, the great thing about braised meat is that it’s better the next day, after the flavors have had a chance to really meld and settle in. Last weekend we pulled out a pork arm roast and braised it on a bed of cabbage, onion, and sauerkraut flavored with paprika, caraway and beer. It was pleasant enough the first night, but lunch the next day was when it really shone.

I had made a batch of buttermilk-caraway dinner rolls (from our go-to baking book for such things, Mary’s Bread Basket and Soup Kettle), which were wonderful eaten hot out of the pan with butter, but were also delightful split, toasted, spread with mustard, and turned into little pork-and-cabbage sliders. A pile of cornichons and a glass of Pacific Rim Riesling completed a rather dreamy lunch.

And because we made a truly enormous amount, I had those sliders again yesterday (maybe today, too). And for dinner last night, I threw together this interesting noodle dish. Some fresh shredded cabbage, sauteed in olive oil until well browned, tossed with some of the leftover braised pork, and mixed with cooked gemelli pasta and doused with Frank’s hot sauce. It came out well, with a sort of spicy Asian-fusiony sort of effect. I liked it.

This has been a great season for cabbage. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much cabbage as I have this winter. This is partly due to an influx of wonderful new recipes, but also just an increased appreciation for the flavor of properly cooked cabbage. Plus, it’s way cheap.

The latest installment of “cabbage — it’s what’s for dinner” takes the form of a bulgur pilaf. I love bulgur, for its chewiness, nuttiness, and most importantly, easy-to-cookness. This pilaf accents the sweet earthy flavors of bulgur and cabbage with sumac, allspice, green onion and pine nuts. The sumac provides a cool sour note that makes this a little different than your (meaning my) usual workaday bulgur pilaf. And freshly ground allspice just makes your kitchen smell wonderful.

I made a full recipe of this, which seems to have made enough pilaf for a small army (fortunately the leftovers are excellent with a fried egg). I served it with a salmon fillet coated with a cumin and chile spice rub and seared briefly in olive oil. We also followed the recipe’s suggestion and mixed up some garlic yogurt, which was lovely with both the fish and the pilaf.

Bulgur Pilaf with Cabbage and Sumac

adapted from Moro East by Sam and Sam Clark (original recipe was in metric, this is more or less how I interpreted it)

• 1 ½ cups coarse bulgur
• 1/2 stick butter
• one bunch green onions, cut into half inch lengths
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• large handful pine nuts
• half of one cabbage, shredded
• 1 ½ cups chicken broth
• 1 Tbsp sumac powder
• 1 bunch parsley, chopped

Rinse the bulgur in cold water and drain. Melt the butter in a large pot, add the green onions, pine nuts and allspice and cook for five minutes or so.

Put in the cabbage and saute until it wilts and cooks down. Add the bulgur, then the chicken broth. Bring to a boil, put the lid on and simmer furiously for five minutes (I added a little extra water at this point, since it seemed a bit dry). Turn down the heat to medium low and simmer another five minutes. Stir in the sumac and parsley, then pop the lid back on, turn off the heat and let it rest at least five minutes.

Mix up some garlic yogurt: plop a cup or so plain whole fat yogurt into a bowl, press a clove of garlic into it, and stir well.

Serve with the yogurt, plus some fish, or lamb, or sausage, or a fried egg, or…

I thought I was being so virtuous when I thought of doing a piece of fish and some braised cabbage for dinner on Sunday. Simple, low-carb, easing us off of the rich food bandwagon. Ha.

The trouble was, I had half a head of Savoy cabbage in the fridge, needing to be used up. And since the last time I made Molly Stevens’ recipe for braised Savoy cabbage with triple-cream cheese, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do much else with Savoy (I didn’t print the recipe last time, but I’m sure going to now). And as it turned out, the only suitable cheese we could find at the supermarket was Cambozola – wowie. A mite stinkier than the Delice de Bourgogne I used before, with the added exciting feature that the bits of blue mold in the cheese remained behind as the cheese melted, creating strange little blue growths in the cabbage. Sounds revolting, I know, but YUM.

You could, of course, leave the cheese out. The braised cabbage smells delightful even before the cheese goes in. But why would you deprive yourself of total deliciousness? I ask you.

Oh, the cod was good, too – I smeared it with stoneground mustard and stuck it in the oven when the cabbage came out. It went well with the cabbage and cheese, which was frankly the important thing. And we opened a Willow Crest viognier which worked nicely.

Braised Savoy Cabbage with Stinky Cheese (serves two)

adapted from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

• 1/2 head Savoy cabbage, shredded
• a few scallions, chopped
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 3/4 cup chicken stock (more or less – I didn’t measure)
• 1 1/2 ounces triple-cream stinky cheese, cut up into small pieces

Butter a small gratin or souffle dish. Preheat the oven to 350°.

Melt the butter in a cast iron pan and toss in the scallions and cabbage. Cook, stirring, until the cabbage is completely wilted and beginning to turn golden in places. Add the stock, bring to a boil and let cook a few minutes more.  Dump it all into the prepared dish, cover tightly with foil and pop it into the oven. Wait 45 minutes, then take off the foil and wait another 20 minutes.

Take out the gratin, crank up the oven to 375°, and dot the cheese around the top of the cabbage. Back in the oven for 10 minutes (you can cook a piece of fish at this point, or perhaps make some toast. Toast would be good). Take the gratin out when the cheese has completely melted down into the cabbage, creating a silky, sweet, luxurious gravy in the bottom of the dish. Be prepared to lick your plate.

We got our first snow this weekend, with a vengeance! Saturday was breezy and cold, and a light snow fell all afternoon, but then it really picked up overnight and by Sunday morning we had a good 5 inches on the ground. Too bad I had to go to work on Sunday – fortunately I have a very short commute.

But at least I had Saturday at home, and it was a good one. We picked up our Christmas tree in the morning from a local tree farm, and I was able to spend the afternoon in the house, making a batch of caramels, decorating the tree, and putting together a choucroute garni for dinner. It simmered away quietly in the oven, perfuming the house with the scent of cabbage and pork, while we fussed about with stockings and ornaments.

My version of choucroute garni varies a bit, but I have never once followed an actual recipe. I pull out some rather vague instructions from a couple of cooking classes, maybe glance at Tony Bourdain’s version (the intro to which begins, “Oh, steaming heap of pork!”) and proceed to generally ignore all of them. Here’s how this particular batch came to be:

I sliced some bacon into lardons and sauteed them until they released their fat, then I add a sliced sweet onion and most of a head of shredded cabbage. This all cooked down together and got a bit browned, then I added a bay leaf, a large pinch of caraway seeds, a jar of Fahrmann’s sauerkraut (drained but not rinsed) and half a bottle of Bass beer. I let that simmer until the beer was almost gone, then I added an entire kielbasa sausage, cut into bite-size pieces, a small container of chicken stock and most of the rest of the beer, poured the whole mess into a Dutch oven (which I should have started it in in the first place), covered it, put it in a 350° oven and left it alone for about an hour and a half.

By the time it came out of the oven, the cabbage and onions had braised into complete tenderness and the flavor of the sausage and sauerkraut had melded into everything. We ate big scoops of it with a slightly sour multigrain bread and stoneground mustard. I was going to cook some potatoes but I completely forgot. I also opened a northwest Riesling that I thought would be perfect, but it was maybe a touch too flowery to be an ideal match. Still, we ate and drank by the newly decorated tree with snow falling outside and felt that all was well.

Last Saturday we cooked up quite a storm. We were kind of stuck at home, since Jon managed to throw his back out a few days before and was still on a fun variety of medications and spending most of his time on the couch. So why not cook?

To start, I made up a batch of carrot dip. I made this for friends a week ago, and it was so good it vanished instantly, so I wanted to do it again just for the two of us. It’s just roasted carrots pureed with olive oil, salt, fresh mint and a pinch of caraway or cumin seed, served with a sprinkling of feta cheese, and it is great. Plus it did a fantastic job of using up the six-pound bag of carrots we bought at the last farmer’s market.

Then I threw together another recipe from good old Art of Braising, which is rapidly becoming one of those cookbooks that I want to make every single recipe out of. I had tried the “Best Braised Cabbage in the World” already, but I saw a rave about the “Savoy Cabbage Gratin with Saint Marcellin” on Orangette that made me head straight out to the co-op to look for French triple-cream cheeses. I ended up with Delice de Bourgogne, which I thought worked splendidly [huh. I just realized that's what Molly ended up using, too. Weird]. The final dish was smooth and sweet, with a delightful funkiness about it from the cheese. Leftovers have been singularly tasty.

To support the cabbage, then, I invented a pork braise. Years ago, my father came up with a nifty preparation for pork blade steaks (which are excitingly cheap!), roasting them slowly in the oven with lots of preserved lemon and garlic. It occurred to me, though, with all the braising I’ve been doing, that blade steaks should braise wonderfully. So I seared the pork, deglazed the pan with a bit of dry Riesling and some chicken broth, tossed in half a preserved lemon and some slivered garlic, and let it braise for an hour, tossing in some olives partway through. Then I took the pork out and boiled the liquid down into a fabulously unctuous gravy. That’s made pretty darn good leftovers, too.

To go with dinner, we had a bottle of beautifully dry, delicate Riesling from Pacific Rim, and an olive baguette from the Breadfarm.

Then we made brownies.

Think of it as training for Thanksgiving…

The braised red cabbage salad we had at Gretchens the other day reminded us that we do actually like cabbage. It can, of course, be awful – and a good way to stink up your house – but it doesn’t have to be. I discovered the appeal of plain green cabbage when I lived by myself in college – I had a miniscule food budget which I spent primarily on cabbage, potatoes and a single bottle of cheap white wine that lasted me the whole term (Sutter Home, I think it was). I would saute the potatoes and cabbage, then add wine and let the whole thing simmer until tender. Not bad, and as cheap as it comes.

Once my budget got a little healthier, though, I stopped buying cabbage as often. I would occasionally toss some in a Russian soup or make a coleslaw, but that was about it. Recently, though, I’ve become more aware of the possibilities of cabbage – especially braised.

Molly Stevens touts this as the best braised cabbage in the world. I can’t vouch for that as yet, but I can say it’s very easy to eat: tender, sweet, just a touch earthy. We served this alongside our favorite Ethiopian beef tartare and spiced curds, and it was the perfect foil for the hot green spice. You could also adjust the seasonings to reflect different cuisines: a bit of turmeric would make this very similar to the cabbage served at the Horn of Africa stand at the Folklife Festival (yum!) and maybe caraway and apples for a more Germanic take.

Because this braises for a long time, and I wanted it as part of a weeknight dinner, I did it in two steps: I braised the cabbage the day before, then put it in the fridge. The next day after work, I rewarmed it, then did the final roasting just before serving. Worked like a charm.

Braised cabbage

adapted from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

one head of green cabbage
one or two carrots
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup chicken broth
pinch red pepper flakes
kosher salt
fresh ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 325°. Core the cabbage and cut it into eight wedges. Lay them in an oiled roasting pan – if they don’t all fit in one layer, set the extra aside for something else (we used some in a pork stirfry – delicious). Cut the carrots into 1/2 inch rounds and scatter over the cabbage. Pour the oil and broth over, then sprinkle with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Cover the pan with foil and put it in the oven. Let braise for two hours, turning the cabbage pieces halfway through. (This much can be done ahead of time)

Turn the oven up to 400°, remove the foil, and roast about 15 minutes so the cabbage turns a little brown on top – it produces a wonderful sweet crispy effect on the tips of the leaves. Sprinkle with fleur de sel, if you like, and serve the wedges either whole or chopped up.

We did our first volunteering of the season this week at Gretchen’s Cooking School. The chef was Don Shank of the Rhododendron Cafe, a nice place out on Chuckanut Drive in Bow. The Rhody has a gimmick, of sorts: each month they feature a different theme or ethnicity, so the menu is constantly changing. They also close every winter so the owners can travel and keep their sanity – the secret to the restaurant’s longevity. Not a bad idea, really.

The focus of this class was seasonal food, especially local, so it featured cabbage, squash, apples and cheese. The weather’s gotten really chilly this week, so it was great to have all the warm, sweet flavors. Don brought lots of extra squash and some branches of Chinese lanterns for decor.

The first dish was a warm red cabbage salad. Don brought a vat of it already made, then demonstrated as well. It was both sweet and spicy, with a bit of cayenne, and served with spiced walnuts, sliced pears and a small lump of locally produced Gothberg Farms goat cheese. I adore braised cabbage, so I really went for this plate.

The entree was a fall-themed pasta: penne tossed with a mixture of butternut squash, apples, butter, sage and chopped-up pheasant sausage (imported from Utah). It was delish.

To finish us all off, Don made tarte tatin. He brought three already made, then demonstrated one. The fresh one was harder to cut, since it was still warm, but oh was it good. The slices, already redolent of butter and sugar, were served with a dollop of cinnamon whipped cream. Some people may have had trouble recovering from that dessert, but it sure was worth it.