Cooking red cabbage

The whole place stinks of cabbage, and its no-ones fault but my own!

There’s something friendly about red cabbage that I’ve never felt for its green relatives, and I suspect that its because I get to grow it in summer rather than in winter when the green cabbages thrive under frosty conditions. Something went wrong last year though, and I planted the red cabbage late in summer, with the consequence that this last lot soldiered on through the winter and produced lots of small cabbages that I’ve now been cutting up for the cook just to get the darn things out of the garden to make way for Spring crops.

Normally we’d keep some of these red cabbages for salads, but this time we’re in a rush, and so we’ve cooked the 2kg of shredded cabbage harvested and will store this in jars.

Onions and apple are chopped and fried in butter and oil before the finely-shredded red cabbage is added. Sultanas, raisins, a little sugar, salt and pepper, balsamic vinegar and a bay leaf are thrown in, and after some frying the whole operation changes to steaming in a large pot with a lid on it, reducing the whole to a half.

Like so many things to do with cooking and gardening, this seems like a great deal of work for a small result. But that perception probably arises from the little we see these days of food preparation in a society fed on factory foods processed out of sight and designed for convenience, allowing one to spend ones days sitting before a television set instead of spending healthy time in kitchen and garden.

I’m sure I’ll appreciate this home-grown recipe some time in the coming months, just as soon as the smell goes away.

In the meantime, I’m escaping the kitchen and grating duties to head out into the garden and plant more Dutch red cabbage. This time on-schedule…