cabbage – The Kitchen Illiterate

Thai Chicken Satay Pasta

The Midwestern girl in me loves a baked pasta dish. If you spend enough time digging through the archives of this site you’ll probably feel sort of appalled at the number of casseroles and casserole-like dishes I’ve managed to kludge together over the years. Give me a baking dish and a hodgepodge of ingredients, and I’ll make you a casserole. Some people aren’t into those kinds of things, but to those people I say, you are missing out. Unless you don’t like pasta (in which case, who are you?) what could be wrong with pasta baked into a dish with other yummy things?
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Field Fresh Chopped Salad with Chicken

I’ve always loved the idea of eating a great big luscious crunchy salad for dinner. But I’ve never been very good at coming up with creative ideas for main dish salads. I tend to get stuck at lettuce and carrots. And my basic vinaigrette is great, but it can get a bit monotonous. But there is a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s that I love: the Field Fresh Chopped Salad. It’s sweet and savory and fresh and crunchy, and I got in the habit of buying it for solitary dinners and occasional lunches. Then I looked at the ingredients. The poor chicken in this salad is full of so many preservatives, and I know the vegetables could be fresher and more full of flavor. So I decided to make this salad myself.
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Quick Pickled Cabbage Salad

It took me a long time to become a fan of cabbage. In fact, most cruciferous vegetables were anathema to me as a young child, for their somewhat, um, gassy odor. Cabbage was nothing to me but the bitter, slightly wilted filler in salad bars, and the stinky, mayonnaise-clogged pile of coleslaw I avoided at picnics. I never realized you could cook cabbage, but my first taste of the vegetable braised, until it became silky smooth and almost sweet, was an eye-opener. These days, I’m starting to enjoy raw cabbage, but I still usually prefer it cooked until some of the harsh, raw flavor dissipates. However, summer is not the time for long, slow cooking, so yesterday, I decided to try something new. I decided to pickle.

There are a lot of recipes for pickled cabbage, and many of them looked very involved. Some involved long periods of salting and fermentation, but I wanted more fast and easy. This preparation isn’t fancy, and certainly some additional spices and complicated steps might result in something more complex and mind-blowing, but I am quite pleased with how it came out. And as part of a simple composed salad, it’s pretty spectacular.
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White Bean, Tomato, and Chard Salad

I never really thought to eat chard raw, but the stuff I’ve been getting from the CSA is so tender that last week, I decided to give it a shot. Admittedly, this isn’t entirely raw: The bean and tomato mixture was hot, and wilted the chard a bit when they were tossed together. But it still held onto some crunch, and with the addition of cabbage, this salad has a great combination of textures. And the flavor was pretty amazing. In fact, I hadn’t intended this to be a blog dinner. It was just a quick weeknight meal, thrown together from what was in my pantry, but I was so pleased with how it came out, I had to share.
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Pasta Salad with Salmon, Cabbage, and Carrots

Last week, I broke out the grill for the first time in a year and cooked up some lovely salmon fillets. Being as I was only making dinner for one, I ended up with more grilled salmon than I could eat in one night, and the next day I used the rest to put together a huge bowl of this lovely pasta salad. Well, it ended up being more pasta salad than I could eat in one night, and I had pasta salad to last me many days. And I got a little sick of it after it became my fourth lunch in a row, so I might recommend that if you make this pasta salad, you have more than one person around to eat it. Because I do think you should make this pasta salad. It’s pasta salad season, after all, and this one is unique.
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