Raw vegan cabbage and kale slaw

I really enjoy Ani Phyo’s cookbooks – so much so that I just bought her most recent one, Ani’s Raw Food Essentials. While I haven’t tried any recipes from that one yet, I wanted to share the slaw that I’m addicted to, from her earlier book, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen. I can’t say yet which book is my favourite, but if you’re at all interested in raw food, you should definitely pick up one of them.

The recipe calls for red cabbage, but I recently made it with green (that’s what comes in my box) and it was just as good. Garden-fresh kale is a lot more tender, but any will do. I’ve made the dressing with macadamia nuts instead of Brazil and it worked that way, too. You could probably also use cashews.

Don’t skip the wakame, it adds delicious crunch and flavour. But if you don’t like soggy seaweed, and plan to keep this in the fridge for a few days like I often do, don’t add the wakame until serving. I don’t often keep hemp oil in the house so I usually use olive oil.

Hempseeds at the store are expensive. I buy mine online.

Ani Phyo’s Wakame Hemp Power Slaw

1/2 head of green or red kale, ribs removed, and leaves torn into bite-sized pieces
1/4 head red or green cabbage, cored and thinly sliced
2 green onions, chopped
1/2 cup dry wakame
1/2 cup hempseeds

Dressing:
3/4 cup Brazil nuts
2 cloves garlic (I find this very garlicky, so if you’d prefer a milder taste, cut down to one)
1 tablespoon grated ginger (I use extra and just toss peeled chunks in the food processor)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup hemp or olive oil
Juice of 1 lime, about 2 tablespoons
1/4 cup water

Mix kale, cabbage, green onions and wakame in a bowl. In a food processor, process nuts, garlic, ginger and salt until well mixed. Add remaining ingredients, and process until smooth. Toss with slaw.

Top with hempseeds to serve, or you can just mix them in with everything else.

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Rye Berry Soup with Cabbage and Dill Sour Cream

I recently resurrected a favourite soup from last winter’s cabbage-cooking mission. (I haven’t been getting the CSA for the past few months – not enough time to keep up with it – so haven’t had the piles of cabbage I used to have.)

It’s from a wonderful cookbook, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass, that I recommend for anyone who wants to learn about whole grains. It’s not just a collection of recipes; the author goes into the history of grains and writes a profile on each one she includes. And it’s not just the basics like wheat and barley, either: less-common grains like teff, amaranth and even job’s tears are included. Better yet, when she says “whole grains”, she really means it. For instance, the rye in the soup is whole rye berries, unprocessed, that still have the odd bit of grass mixed in when you buy them. Definitely nutritious, and delicious – they’re chewy and stay that way, a texture I like in soup (as opposed to mushy pasta or rice).

This soup isn’t a ton of work – just chopping onions and cabbage, and presoaking the rye – and it makes 6 servings that heat up well as leftovers for lunch. A hard-boiled egg makes a good side, and my favourite addition so far is rye crostini (that I got from Longo’s).

Truth? I didn’t make the dill sour cream; I just served at home with plain yogurt and at work with no dairy. It’s just as good. And, um, I didn’t chop my caraway seeds. But don’t dare leave out the lemon juice.

I also added extra broth, can’t recall how much, but this soup is pretty forgiving of changes like that.

A note on the whole rye: it seems more complicated than it is. Don’t forget that you’re using them for soup so it doesn’t matter if there’s a bit of extra water or if they’re not entirely evenly cooked. Soak overnight then cook the grains in the morning. You can leave them for the day before making the soup in the evening if you like.

Rye Berry Soup with Cabbage and Dill Sour Cream

2 tbsp butter
2 large onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp sweet paprika
1/2 tsp caraway seeds, chopped
8 cups (tightly packed) shredded cabbage (1 3/4 pounds – about 1/2 a head of cabbage)
6 cups reduced-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
2 tsp sugar
2 to 3 cups cooked Basic Whole Rye Berries (see below)
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 to 3 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

For the dill sour cream:
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup chopped fresh dill
1 tsp apple cider vinegar

Serves 6

Heat the butter in a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring frequently, until they soften, about 4 mins. Stir in the garlic, tomato paste, paprika and caraway and cook for another minute, stirring constantly. Lower the heat if the mixture threatens to burn.

Stir in 2 cups of water and the cabbage. [Note: I had to add some of the stock here too.] Bring to a boil, cover, and lower the heat to medium. Cook until the cabbage wilts, stirring occasionally, 8 to 10 mins. Add the broth, sugar, rye berries and salt and pepper. Cook the soup until the cabbage is tender and the flavours have mingled, 15 to 20 additional mins.

Meanwhile, prepare the dill sour cream. In a small bowl, blend the sour cream, dill and vinegar.

When the soup is done, stir in lemon juice to taste, and adjust the seasonings.

To serve, ladle the soup into bowls and top each portion with a dollop of dill sour cream.

Basic Whole Rye Berries

1 cup dry rye berries (makes about 2 1/2 cups cooked)
2 1/2 cups water
Salt to taste (add at end of cooking)

Soak the grains overnight in a heavy Dutch oven or saucepan. Alternatively, do a quick-soak: Bring the water to a rapid boil. Stir in the grains. Turn off the heat, cover, and let stand 1 hour.

Bring the grains to a boil in the soaking liquid. Cover, reduce the heat, and simmer until tender, 25 to 40 mins. Add salt toward the end of cooking, if you wish.

Once a few of the grains have burst open or you detect the whitish starchy endosperm peeking through one end of some grains, start checking for doneness: Cut a few grains in half and see if they are one colour throughout. If so, taste a few grains and see if they are juicy and the bran and starchy centre are soft. Remove from the heat. Rye gets plumper if left to soak in the cooking liquid for an extra 10 to 15 minutes.

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Some coleslaw, some cookies and some plants

Today I made coleslaw, loosely adapted from this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. I chopped some Plan B cabbage,

made dressing (I used part yogurt, and green onions from the community garden – thanks, Mel! – and parsley from my backyard, although really Loblaws grew it, not me),

and mixed it all together.

It’s not bad, although I think (I’m just exploring coleslaw, I used to think I hated it) that I prefer a more watery dressing and less of a mayo-y one – although I do love mayo.

I also cooked up some chocolate chip cookies (most to send to an acquaintance who’s sick), which are mostly decidedly not local, except for the egg and possibly the butter and definitely the flour, which is local and organic and from the Green Barn Market. I was a little worried the cookies would be too dry, as this flour is “all-purpose” but definitely on the whole wheat side of the spectrum, but they seem just fine. In fact, they’re so fine, I need to hide them.

Also, this weekend I put a bunch of my seedlings in pots, finally. Only now has it been warm enough that I don’t have to bring the tomatoes in at night, although even so some of the leaves are still looking purplish. But the anticipation of home-grown fresh tomatoes is building…

And I made it to Karma today to pick up a few things. The haul: maple syrup (they sell it in bulk, much cheaper than you pay elsewhere), rapini, fiddleheads, lettuce, spinach – all local. Well, and some protein powder. You can’t win them all.

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Cabbage braised in cream

Food blog(ger) Sassy Radish did a post the other day with a new-to-me cabbage recipe that I just had to try. The twist is that the cooked cabbage is braised in cream, which gives it a much more luxurious taste than many cabbage recipes.

And yes, I’m still getting cabbage in my organics boxes.

I made the recipe pretty much as described, but instead of leeks I used green garlic as I’d gotten it in my box. I cooked the cabbage perhaps not as long as I should have, as it was still quite crunchy, but half an hour was long enough to wait – next time I might cook it until soft.

I served it up right away with roasted potatoes, fried shiitakes and a hard-boiled egg, plus homemade pickles, pickled beets and pickled carrots (not pictured, although they should be to add some colour), for a yummy local lunch. (There was stewed rhubarb with yogurt for dessert.)

And yes, as described in the original, it was better the next day.

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Red lentils with cabbage and roasted rhubarb

Tonight for dinner I went back to one of my wintertime staples, Red Lentils with Cabbage from Smitten Kitchen. You see, such is life in Canada that even though it’s now May and we like to think it’s almost summer, we still have to survive off storage vegetables alongside our green leafy ones, and I got another cabbage in my box last week.

This is a great recipe and freezes well – I like to make a batch and freeze it in portion-sized containers with rice so I can pull one out for a lunch when I need it. This time I bought almost-local lentils, red lentils grown in Saskatchewan, and since they were whole lentils and not split the recipe turned out a bit different, although just as good. I had some leftover millet so had it with that for dinner although I’ll be pulling out the brown rice later this week. I always stir in some spinach if I have it and serve with a dollop of plain yogurt, usually Pinehenge Farms.

And for dessert… rhubarb! I made it to Karma this morning and found it as well as fiddleheads (probably for dinner tomorrow) and ramps/wild leeks, which I didn’t buy as I didn’t think I’d get to them in time. I roasted the rhubarb, it’s the easiest way I know of to prepare it: chop into pieces, sprinkle with some sugar and roast at 450F for 20-25 minutes. (Adapted from the cookbook Simply in Season.) Just be careful – I didn’t have a lot and it was thin and I got distracted and overcooked it a bit. Burnt sugar = not good! And I served the rhubarb with yogurt as well.

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Cabbage galette for dinner tonight

Anyone who’s spent any time with me over the past few months knows that thanks to my CSA box from Plan B Organics, I’ve been searching for newer and greater recipes to make with cabbage. A cabbage every two weeks turns out to be a lot, and I refuse to throw them out, so we’ve been eating a lot of cabbage.

One of the best recipes I’ve come up with is from Smitten Kitchen, my current website crush and an excellent food blog. She has a cabbage and mushroom galette that’s to die for, and it’s in the oven right now. It’s especially perfect since I usually get local shiitake mushrooms in the box along with the cabbage and other veggies. (I’ll show off a picture of my box in a few days.)

I recommend this galette even if you’re not trying to use up all your cabbage, but she also has a butternut squash one that I’m sure is just as good, and her easy (but slightly time-consuming due to chilling time) pastry recipe would work just as well with apples or another fruit.

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