24. Cabbage and Apples Braised in Cider

Date Cooked: October 3rd, 2008
Page: 148
Rating: C+

Sorry it has been a busy week and it will probably only get busier so my time for posting is limited (I usually write these posts during breaks at work but I’m not getting too many of those at the moment). But enough excuses and on with the food adventures!

I had made a vegetable soup early in the week and had a fair amount of cabbage left so I was trying to find a good cabbage recipe from the book. There are not many… recipes in total for cabbage not just good recipes for cabbage. I saw a recipe for braised cabbage and figured that could be interesting. I traditionally only eat cabbage in coleslaw, cabbage rolls and soup. That is the extent of my culinary travels with cabbage so cooking it as a focal point in a dish would be new for me.

The recipe is fairly straight forward so I was able to navigate without too much difficulty. Only one hiccup with this recipe. It starts by sautéing apples in butter. This went well but since I was cooking two other dishes at the same time I may have left the apples sitting for too long before stirring them around. It turns out that the natural sugars in Granny Smith apples can caramelize fairly quickly. I added the apple cider, caraway seeds and some thyme and let it reduce. Then I packed the large saucepan (dutch oven) full of cabbage. Then I had to toss to combine. I loved this part. You see I had so much cabbage that I couldn’t actually maneuver anything in the pot. As I struggled to get the sauce (that was burning on the bottom) to cover the cabbage I was spilling cabbage everywhere. Nothing is as pleasant as lightly syrupy cabbage hitting a hot burner. I love burnt sugar as much as the next person (which is very little, just to make that clear), but cleaning burnt sugar from a burner is not fun. I finally got fed up and just put the cover on and let it cook down some. I returned a few minutes later and was pleasantly surprised to find that it cooked down nicely and I was finally able to get all the cabbage coated, made even easier due to the water released from the cabbage. The water even helped release some of the charcoal from the bottom of the pot.

It really didn’t take long to prepare but the verdict? Well I had two helpings but not really because I liked it but simply because no one else was likely to eat it. I would definitely eat cabbage braised again but I would probably change the additional ingredients. The apple flavor was pretty strong and could have been mellowed out a bit. The apples themselves weren’t really needed and I probably could have just used the cider. I’m also on the fence with regards to caraway seeds. Not sure if I like them, am indifferent to them or dislike them. Basically I have no idea about them. I don’t even know if I could identify their taste in a dish. Really I don’t think I am remotely qualified to talk about them. If they had legal rights I’m sure I would be slapped with a slander suit right now so I will back off the caraway seeds.

Rating: C+ I’m really torn about this one. I wanted to like it and don’t really have anything overwhelmingly bad to say about it but it just wasn’t… right. I won’t prepare this dish again as written, let’s put it that way.