When life hands you lemons...

When I arrived home famished tonight, the produce drawer handed me a questionable cabbage--one of those vegetables that rolled around in the fridge for weeks, unclaimed by anyone, until one day last week it was mysteriously assigned to my drawer. Hunger cravings overwhelming me, I told myself that I had to keep it under control until I could figure out what to do with my cabbage.

All of this was further spurred on because a friend told me last night that he "just isn't a cabbage man"--dear ol' cabbage and I take that as a personal affront and a gauntlet thrown.

I looked to my new compendium of vegetable love, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (more than 200 pages in the section on produce alone!), written by Mark Bittman, a writer for the NYT. His cabbage offerings were less than inspirational, but I flipped over to the Brussels Sprouts section (they are, after all, mini cabbages) and decided to adapt an "Indian-style treatment" of the tasty gems.

Ingredients:
1 head green cabbage--cored, chopped into bite-sized pieces (the size isn't too important)
About 1 Tbsp. olive oil for the pan
2-3 tsp. mustard
2-3 tsp. paprika/crushed red pepper flakes/black ground pepper (some like it hot)

1-2 Tbsp. Garam Masala (a slightly sweet mix of spices)

Real Salt
About 1/3 cup plain yogurt
2 tsp. coconut milk

Once I'd removed the older leaves from the outside of the cabbage and chopped the remaining, I rinsed it in our salad spinner. I left a good bit of moisture on the leaves.

I heated the olive oil over medium-high heat (a 6 out of 10) in an oversized skillet with a lid, then added about 1 tsp. each of the mustard and the pepper flakes and a generous sprinkling of the garam masala. I heated for about 1 minute until they became fragrant, then added the cabbage. I let it simmer for a bit, but had to pour off a bit of the water left from the leaves and add more spice. I should say that for this dish, the spiciness and flavor are really up to you. Add some spice, then try it; if the dish isn't flavorful enough, add more spice! X, Ladson, and I all agree it's best to be liberal with pepper.

After about five minutes, I added the yogurt and coconut milk. Bittman's recipe called for a cup of coconut milk, but I decided the yogurt substitution would be just as creamy without all the fat. I stirred, covered the skillet, and let it cook over higher heat (about an 8 out of 10) for 5 more minutes, until the cabbage was nice and soft. I cooked for a couple more minutes without the lid, until the whole melange was at my desired thickness.

In another skillet, I'd heated up a wild-caught salmon burger from Whole Foods. When everything was done, I put it on a small plate (this trick is recommended to help you avoid eating way TOO much of your healthy delicacy) and ate up. Not the most picturesque of vegetable meals, but certainly a delight to taste. A bit sweet, a hint of sour--not altogether removed from lemonade.

guac

Part of me (X) really does not want to share this recipe. Why? because everyone LOVES it, and I get all the credit. But, pushing my pride aside, I will divulge the secrets to avocado goodness that I received from my aunt. Straight from Southern California where I learned to eat:

1/2 onion chopped
cilantro chopped
jalepeno pepper, chopped (you can use cayenne pepper and chili powder if you can't get a jalepeno)2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tomato coarsley chopped (tomatoes on the vine are the best!)
juice from 1-2 limes
sea salt
cumin (optional)
2-3 avocados

Making guacamole, like any cooking process, is not a precise thing.  Go with what you like, if you don't like onions, don't put them in.  If you like things more spicy, add another pepper, if you can't handle heat, don't put any jalapeño in.  If you can't get a fresh tomato, don't sweat it. You will still enjoy this concoction if things are not just the way I (or any other self-designated Mexican food expert) have written.

Chop the stems off of the jalapeño, de-seed it and chop it fine.  Remove stems (as much as is reasonable) from cilantro and chop that fine as well.  Often I will use my little food processor to simplify the process of chopping cilantro and jalapeños and garlic into little bitty pieces, and sometimes onions, too. But if you are like Sarah, you will go to town on that chopping block and do just fine.

Mix everything together, add cut up avocados last to keep it chunky.

Avocados are supposed to be one of the best fats you can consume, so eat up!  A great tip for keeping avocados fresh, I learned from my sweet Texan roommate: keep the pit and put it in the container in which you keep the guacamole/partly consumed avocado, it will keep that soft stuff nice and green and tasty for a week!

One caution: as always, read the label of those corn chips!!! Most of the corn produced in America is incredibly modified from the way our ancestors ate it (whole grain, ground up and soaked in LIME).  If you can get organic, non-GMO corn chip cooked in non-GMO oil, that's the way to go!

sweet (and salty) potatoes

I don't even like french fries any more. But who can resist salty and sugary sweet potato fries?
Don't worry, ours are still healthy guaranteed!

Peel your sweet potatoes, especially if they are not organic. The pesticides that prevail in conventional soil will be most dense on the skins of root vegetables such as potatoes, beets and carrots. Slice those potatoes really thin for more crispness in your fries.

There are so many ways to season "fries". This time I coated a cookie sheet with a little olive oil, honey, salt, pepper, and cinnamon. I'm careful not to put too much liquid on there because it will make the potatoes soggy. Then I tossed on the thinly sliced sweet potato so that the oil-honey blend covered them and they were evenly spaced on the sheet.

We broiled them on high on the top rack. If you don't have a broiler or an oven with 'Broil' setting, you can set your oven to a temperature somewhere above 450* f. Depending on how thin you sliced the potatoes and how hot your oven gets, they will take about 20 minutes give or take. Don't forget to flip them over mid-way!

The second round of unFries, Sarah thought it may be more effective to use a rack instead of a cookie sheet so the heat would circulate around the potatoes and encourage crispiness. This was somewhat effective, but we decided to put them back on the cookie sheet to get that oil on the unFries for flavor.

They are so hot and yet so yummy, slide them onto paper towel to cool a little, but if you're like our photographer, you may not be able to wait for that!