Last night, we still had half a head of red cabbage sitting in the fridge. We’ve never had red cabbage in our house before, so it’s taken a while to get ourselves down to just half a head.
What do people do with red cabbage?
All I can think about is the salad bar where the old man in front of you is picking through the mixed greens so that he doesn’t get any bright purple pieces of cabbage in his salad.
There’s got to be more than that, right?
I’m trying to challenge myself with incorporating a few seasonal vegetables into our meals – the kind of seasonal vegetables that we normally don’t buy.
You can probably guess that when you live in Europe and you’re buying local produce, you sort of run out of good ol’ American recipes. That’s why our kitchen has been smelling remarkably similar to the retired, East German woman’s next door. She’s always cooking up some sort of funny smelling food, and on several occasions, I have to admit that I have closed our windows so we wouldn’t smell it any more.
Old style European cooking – especially Eastern European – is certainly not bad. It’s just different than American cooking. I’m always nervous to take a bite. And I’m nervous to eat everything on my plate because at least in my experiences with Martin’s Czech grandmother, you could gain five pounds in one sitting. You just can’t get enough, and when you have, she refills your plate with just as much food. Boiled potato breads, thick sauces, dense vegetables, the creamiest, saltiest mashed potatoes…
The weirdest thing is that as an American, I have absolutely no idea what she puts in her food. I mean, I get that fried cauliflower has cauliflower. What I don’t know is why it doesn’t taste like cauliflower. The spices, the mixture of foods – I don’t know. I can’t even duplicate the mashed potatoes!
Eastern European cooking is not something I’m about to wing. That’s why I follow recipes here, and I follow carefully.
The first half of the cabbage became a very German, soft cabbage and apples combo that I cooked on the stovetop. I think we had leftovers for six days!
The second half of our cabbage became this:
It’s an Eastern European style “Cabbage Pie”. I know I put a mountain of dill in there and some hardboiled eggs (told you it was different!). But even as the cook, I still can’t figure it out.
Cabbage pie makes your house smell like the old country.
It makes me open the windows in hopes that the lady next door will smell it and forget all that banging and sawing we did last year when we rebuilt our kitchen.
It makes me think, “Maybe I should bike over to the market and get another cabbage.” Then I remember.
There may be no cabbage in our fridge… but there’s still a whole lot of cabbage pie.
While we’re talking about Eastern European style, you might just be interested in how we celebrated a Czech Christmas last year.
