using up our CSA share: cabbage

I have a new-found love for cabbage lately. I don’t remember ever being too crazy about it, although I’ve always loved cole slaw. We got a whole bunch of it from the CSA and from a local farm, so we’ve been eating it for just about every meal for the past for weeks. Here are three different ways that I’ve prepared it lately:

Beef and cabbage
A Sara Original

I don’t know what I was expecting when I through this together one night (in about twenty minutes from start to finish), but I wasn’t expecting us all to enjoy it so much, I know that. It’s easy, delicious, and healthy – and everyone asked for seconds. This was definitely a keeper!

Ingredients

1 pound happily-raised ground beef (or pork, turkey, etc.)
2 tbsp fat of choice (I used some coconut oil, but use whatever you like)
1 whole head cabbage, sliced
1 onion, diced
1 jalapeno, cayenne, or any hot pepper, diced (remove seeds if you don’t like spicy)
1 tsp oregano or thyme
3 cloves garlic, minced
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Brown the meat in a large skillet with the oil/butter. Once most of it is browned, add the onion and cook until the onion is translucent. Add the spices, pepper, and garlic, and cook just until you start to smell the garlic. Then add the cabbage, lower the heat to medium-low, and cover the pan for about 15 minutes, stirring every few minutes.  The cabbage will release water, so it will steam itself up a bit in the closed pan. Once the cabbage has softened up (about 20 minutes), you’re ready to eat.

Fermented kimchi

I used this recipe and modified it quite a bit because I didn’t have radishes or green onions, but I also used airlocks, which she doesn’t use. Check out this post for more information. It’s still healthy and delicious even if you just want to make a big batch and keep it in the fridge instead of messing with all of the fermentation details (although, I will say, that fermenting is more than worth the little bit of reading upfront).

Freezing cabbage

After fermenting about 12 quarts of the cabbage, I still had quite a bit to use up. Since we all enjoy cabbage so much in soups and stews, I decided to just blanch and freeze some that can easily be added to soups and stews in the middle of winter. I washed the cabbage heads thoroughly, removing several of the outer leaves. Then I cut them in half, but left the core intact to help with the blanching process to keep all of the leaves together. Then I brought a large pot of water to a boil, dumped the cabbage halves in the boiling water for about a minute, then layed them out in a colander to drip-dry. Once they had cooled off, I put them in large plastic bags and put them in the freezer. (I blanched them first just in hopes of killing any leftover bacteria that might have been on the leaves). They take up quite a bit of space in the freezer, but they have already come in handy as an easy addition to soups to add some veg.