A Pot of Cabbage for the New Year

We ate the first head of our fall cabbage on New Year’s Day, and boy, was it good!

I write a lot in this column about growing vegetables. The whole point in growing vegetables is eating them, after all.

One reason home-grown produce tastes so good is because we often eat it as soon as it comes out of the garden. Store-bought produce is likely grown somewhere far away. It must be shipped under refrigeration. By the time it makes it to your kitchen, it might be two weeks old. Plant tissue oxidizes, losing both taste and nutritional value, the longer it takes to get from the field to the table.

More importantly, I think, delicious vegetables come from healthy soil. Soil that is full of microbial life, minerals and nutrients grows tastier produce. I believe that’s the main reason why a homegrown cabbage tastes so much better than one grown in depleted soil and bought at the store.

Most soils are low in rock minerals. Plants cannot reach their greatest genetic when grown in soil that lacks trace minerals. Mineral amendments like lava sand, greensand and the commercial product Azomite all help to improve the soil.

Most commercial fertilizers only replace Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K) that plants use during the growing season. But plants also consume smaller amounts of calcium, magnesium and silica compounds. Think of it like cooking a pot of chicken noodle soup. Sure, you can boil some chicken and noodles together and call it a soup. But it tastes much better if you add some onion, celery, carrots, salt and pepper to the pot.

We need to “season” our soil with amendments like rock minerals.

Plants that are higher in sugar content also taste better. You can boost the sugar content of plant tissue by applying seaweed extract. Besides making the plants taste better, the increased sugar content also helps plants to better withstand drought and extreme temperatures. For this reason, I apply a foliar spray of seaweed extract in my garden about every two weeks.

Now, let’s talk about cooking our garden vegetables.

Don’t just boil them in water. If you boil a head a cabbage, so many of the nutrients leech out into the water. You end up with something soggy, bland, and relatively un-nutritious. Steaming vegetables keeps most of the flavor and nutrients intact. But we can even do better than that.

Here’s how I cooked a pot of cabbage on New Year’s Day. First, I cut the head of cabbage in half and removed the core. Then I sliced the cabbage into thin strips. I chopped a couple of slices of bacon and fried them in a pan big enough to hold all the cabbage. Then I thinly sliced an onion and a few cloves of garlic and started cooking them in the bacon grease. When the onions and garlic started to release some aroma, I added the cabbage, gently stir-frying it until the strips began to wilt. At this point, I added some salt, pepper and a few tablespoons of red wine vinegar and then put a lid on the pot.

The cabbage will release some liquid as it steams. I stirred it occasionally. If the bottom of the pot gets dry, I add a few tablespoons of water to keep it steaming. But I never submerge the cabbage in water. The dish is done when the white parts of the cabbage get soft, usually in about 20-30 minutes.