The Cabbage Patch

I was racking my brain these past few days, trying to figure out how to frame my latest culinary caper. I had the delicious recipe but nothing in which to couch it. No clever anecdote, no homespun yarns, nothing.

Nothing.

It was the eleventh hour and things looked bleak. You were on your way, loyal fans & detractors, to gettin' nuthin' for Christmas.

And then like a beacon in the night, like Rudolph's nose so bright, my laptop jingled: an instant message. A friend of mine (who, strangely, I interact more with via Facebook than I ever did when we knew each other in the real world) and his wife are expecting their first child. Happy news, indeed. Callooh! Callay!

I just love new babies. Not that I want any of my own - I'd rather spoon an eye out than have a kid - but I truly love it when people that I know get pregnant. People who aren't me having babies delight me to no end. Whether or not the baby itself will delight me is hit or miss. I'm not particularly maternal and I'm more likely to scare a baby than play with it.

Now, I often attribute this lack of maternal instinct to the fact that my Mom staunchly refused to let my sister and I have Cabbage Patch Kids. They were all the rage when I was a kid and I vaguely remember my AuntNYC sending me one for Christmas, much to my mom's barely contained ire. I don't think I was even allowed to play with it; the poor doll just got packed away in the back of The Closet (a giant storage area/attic access in the play-room of my childhood home) never to be seen again. My lack of garden-born babydolls as a kid very possibly correlates directly to my aversion to children as an adult.


How does all of this lead to a frame for my latest recipe (you might be wondering)? Well, it just so happens that said recipe is for cabbage. Whether or not my cabbage came from a patch that also produces babies, I do not know. What I do know is that braised cabbage is delicious and full of all kinds of important (whether you're making a baby or not) nutrional things like folate and calcium and iron and fiber.

And so, thank you, Impending Baby Breeze for the blog inspiration. In your honor (and for all my contemporaries having babies/with babies; there are more and more of you every day), here's the recipe for the newly christened (ha, extended metaphors) Baby, Oh Baby Braised Red Cabbage.

3 tablespoons olive oil
3 small-medium onions, sliced thin
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 apple cider vinegar
2 cups fresh apple cider
1 cup vegetable broth
1 cinnamon stick
1 dried bay leaf
1 1/2 teaspoon salt (to taste)
1/4 teaspoon black pepper (to taste)
1 big ol' head of red cabbage, cut into as many wedges as will fit in your casserole dish, core intact

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In an oven-proof saucepan or casserole dish, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onions and cook for about 10 minutes or until the edges carmelize. Add the sugar and cook until dissolved. Add the vinegar and, using a wooden spoon, scrape up all the brown onion bits from the bottom of the pan. Stir in the stock, cinnamon stick, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Add the cabbage in a single layer (though the wedges can be touching, so you can really sort of cram them in). Bring to a boil. Cover and transfer to the oven. Braise (a fancy name for 'roasting in juices') until the cabbage is tender, about 45 minutes.

Transfer the cabbage wedges to a bowl or tray with a slotted spoon (a pasta-scooping claw works well too). Throw out the cinnamon stick and bay leaf (don't believe the old wives; bay leaves aren't poisonous, they just don't taste particularly good solo) and enjoy.

For additional tastiness, pour the remaining liquid in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes until reduced by half. Spoon the sauce over the cabbage. If you're in a time crunch, you can skip this step, but it's really worth it.

Though this was a main dish for me (accoutered with corn, green beans, and a spinach-balsamic salad), Roomie and my Pap enjoyed it with homemades (slovenian sausages, similar to brats), curly fries, and cooked corn&carrots. Roomie topped it off with Southern Tier's Krampus Imperial Helles Lager and called it a dinner well-made. Also delicious: serving it cold with tomatoes on rye bread the next day.

Baby, you never had it so good.