Thursday, August 12, 2010

Cabbage with Miso


Cabbage is not one of my favorite things.  I'm just never quite sure what to do with it and up until this summer, I can't recall cooking cabbage more than once in an entire year.  About once a year I cook up a batch of sauerkraut, or put together some sort of slaw.  But with our CSA we have ended up with head after head of cabbage and it has taken some serious thought to come up with recipes using cabbage that don't remind me of (for lack of a better term) nursing home food.  I originally thought about making tofu to go with our soba noodles, but then decided that I would rather use up another CSA vegetable and leave the tofu for another day.  Once I settled on either cucumbers or cabbage I went and looked in Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking and found this recipe.  The cabbage we had was a green cabbage that was rather conical in shape.  If I were more familiar with cabbage I might be able to say exactly what variety of cabbage it is, but all I know is that it was a type of green cabbage - not savoy and not napa.

This dish was fine.  It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad either.  We ate the entire bowl so it obviously wasn't bad.  The dressing was very thick and savory, but all about the miso.  Alex and I both thought that the recipe was missing something - the balance was somehow off and it was really one-note.  But what do you expect with a big bowl of cabbage?

Recipe after the jump!



Cabbage with Miso
World of the East Vegetarian Cooking
By Madhur Jaffrey

INGREDIENTS:
4 cups cabbage, finely shredded
1 1/2 tbsp red miso
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp shichimi togarashi

Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil in a 4-quart pot.  Drop in the cabbage and boil for a minute.  Drain in a colander, squeezing all the water out of the cabbage.  Put cabbage in a bowl.  Add the miso, vinegar, salt and sugar.  Mix well.

Either make small mounds and serve in individual Oriental dishes or make a large mound in the center of a large serving bowl.  Dust with the shichimi togarashi. Serve warm, either as a first course or as a salad.

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