Fried Cabbage - a breakfast staple my six year old LOVES

Freshly picked cabbage from the garden.

Summer kicks my ass...or more specifically, it makes my ass grow big.  I'm a creature of the North who gets active between fall and spring. But in the summer I just sit there eating ice cream and sucking down cheap, cold beer and trying to keep from melting.

Fortunately, it's finally cabbage season. The cabbages are big and around, and the Cabbagemancer is back to making one of his favorite dishes: fried cabbage. I eat this stuff for breakfast several times a week. Its like a caramelize cabbage...a little sweet, a little salty and a little fat, it's filling, and its very low calorie. You can eat a huge mound of the stuff (about 4 cups) and only take in about 200 calories. 

Plus my six year old LOVES this stuff. He's been known to pass up french toast in favor of fried cabbage. Here he is shoveling it into his mouth.

Here's what you need:

• About 4 cups of shredded or thinly sliced cabbage. 

That's about four cups, right?

• 1 small onion cut into strips
• 1/2 tablespoon of butter
• Some water for splashing into the frying cabbage to help it steam
• Salt
• Pepper
• Frying pan with a lid and something to move the cabbage around with

Here's what you do:

1. Put everything into the frying pan:  your stack of cabbage, the onion, the butter (add more if you want, butter is good), a sprinkle or three of salt, and pepper to taste. I put a lot of pepper in. And maybe a quarter cup of water.

2. Cover the pan, turn the heat up to medium-high and just let that sucker sit there. 

3. Use a spatula or something to turn the stack of cabbage over every 3 or 4 minutes so as not to burn it. The idea is brown as much of the cabbage as possible. If it starts to burn or get dry, add some more water...about a quarter cup.

4. Keep the heat going until all the cabbage is soft and slightly caramelized. This takes about 15 minutes.

And that's it. I usually serve it on a plate with two eggs over easy and a LOT of hot sauce. Or for my son I make it with less pepper

Feel free to improvise and add other veggies, as well. Thin strips of turnips go really well with this and make it even sweeter. It also goes good with leeks, bell peppers, and of course jalapeños. 

Fermented Cucumber Pickles (and Coriander Sucks)

I tried my hand at fermented pickles a couple weeks ago. They're very easy. If you're lazy like me, they're the perfect lazy person's self-preserved food. You just cram some small cucumbers into a quart jar, cover them in brine, throw in some spices...boom boom boom. The friendly, completely harmless bacteria does all the work for you.

Here's what you do:

1. Get small cucumbers. Ones that will fit comfortably into a quart jar with enough room for at least three cucumbers. Farmer's markets have these. So does Walmart.
2. Sterilize some quart jars. You know...wash them then boil them for about 15 minutes. 
3. Cram cucumbers into the sterilized quart jars. Stuff as many of those suckers as you can into the jar, so long as it's below the lip of the jar.
4. Pour brine into the quart jars.  Brine is basically 3 tablespoons of pickling salt dissolved in 4 cups of water. Pour enough brine in to cover the cucumbers.
5. Toss in the spices. Dill. Mustard seed. Garlic. Whatever. Do what you want here. I made the horrible mistake of adding coriander seed to my last batch of pickles. Turns out coriander is cilantro. I swear to god I didn't know this. I HATE cilantro. Blech...who decided cilantro/coriander qualifies as food? YUCK!
6. Place the jar lid and the ring. I often rip off a jar sized piece of cabbage and put it over the pickles to hold them under the water before putting the jar lid on. 

And that's it. The initial stuff takes about 30 minutes, tops...most of which is sitting there waiting for water to boil to sterilize your jars. After step 6 just let those pickles sit there for two weeks and let the lactobacillus critters that hang around in the air turn the cucumbers into pickles. 

Burp the jars after a couple days......the process of fermentation produces CO2 which builds up in the jars. It's good to let some of that out to release pressure after about 48 hours.

Just remember....don't use coriander if you hate cilantro. In fact, cilantro should be banished from the world.

Within a few days of putting the cucumbers in the brine, they'll start to produce bubbles. After about 3 or 4 days the brine will get cloudy from the friendly bacteria....don't worry about that. After a couple weeks you'll have real, naturally fermented pickles.