So, this week’s veg box progress update… 3 weeks in, the first “horror” item: an enormous white cabbage! Neither of us particularly likes cabbage. Yet here it is, making up 20% of our veg intake for the next 7 days.
If this happens to you, do not look up cabbage recipes on the internet. If you are prejudiced already against cabbages then they all sound foul, especially the soups. One site proudly claims to have collected 200+ such recipes from around the world, and I could not find a single one I wanted to taste. In desparation, resorted to the usual fallback strategy – taking something from Delia’s website and rendering it down to the available time, ingredients, and will to live. Hence I decided to make “cabbage rolls”.
Step 1: Try and remove whole leaves from your socking great leering organic cabbage. The outside layer is probably too gnarled and full of soil/slugs. Curse, make holes in leaves, remove invertebrate passengers from cabbage.
Step 2: “Blanch” leaves. I thought blanching was what genteel ladies did in Victorian novels when presented with something shocking, like an unpolished fork. In fact it involves dunking them in boiling water for 5 mins, so they become suppliant and pliable and beautifully delicate-looking, almost transparent.
Step 3: Wrap and tuck leaves around 2 big spoonfuls of whatever you please (brown rice, kidney beans, carrots, onions, garlic, Tabasco and herbs, with a beaten egg mixed in for consistency). Pour a lazy carton of tomatoes over ‘em and bake (180C, 30 minutes did it for us).
And thus we discovered that cabbage is actually really nice.
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Today: tapas cooking. Apart from the eggs, oil, seasonings and tahini, everything here comes from our box:
Salad: Oakleaf lettuce, cabbage again, cherry tomato, cucumber.
Tortilla: 4 small Accent potatoes, 3 small onions, 1 carrot, 1/5 courgette, basil, oregano, salt & pepper, 6 eggs and a dash of milk.
Courgette: Sliced into 4 lengthways, brushed with olive oil, grilled for 6-7 minutes each side, tahini dressing adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: 50ml tahini, 50ml water (he says 55 but I was using a spirit measure), juice of 2 small lemons (he says 1/2 but OH complained the dressing “tasted like peanut butter”), 1 grated clove of garlic. Lovely stuff.
To reward ourselves for saving the leftovers, we had “lazy black forest” for the second day in a row – early blackberries picked by the Lea, combined with Carte D’Or triple chocolate ice cream. It sort of works, though might never have been invented if we’d had anything else to eat them with…
I noticed that although there were quite a few blackberries already out, nobody apart from us was going near them. Whenever a local happened by, I got embarrassed and pretended not to be hunting and gathering at all. Is it poor etiquette to pick public wild fruit? Do the people of EN3 know something about it that we don’t? Maybe blackberries don’t cost £3 for a teaspoonful in Enfield supermarkets. Though pub grub is £10 per plate (£6 if you have a child’s portion, but it comes in a kiddie bowl!) so I am sceptical.
