Things to put into your mouth

In our household we underspend, as we are saving money to pursue our dreams. One thing we don't underspend on is food because we are both filthy little piggies when it comes to things you can put in your mouth. At least it feels like we overspend on food, but when I sort out the bills at the end of the month the amounts are never staggering.

Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .

When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:

Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:

And when you cut them in half, they look like braaaaaaains. Delicious braaaaaaains. Num num num num. But we'd just eaten three of them in two weeks, which is a fuckload of red cabbage, and I felt like a bit of a change.

We tried the slice/marinate/saladify trick with the Savoy cabbage and it was fucking gross. The F-word had more luck wokking the strips in a black bean sauce with some garlic and mushrooms but it was still not so hot. So we had half a Savoy cabbage sitting in our fridge disgusting us for about a week until Epicurious came to the rescue with this recipe for bacon and cabbage soup:

-(1/3-pound) piece Irish bacon (available at specialty foods shops) or Canadian bacon
-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
-1 medium onion, finely chopped
-2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch bits
-5 1/2 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
-4 Turkish bay leaves
-2 teaspoons kosher salt
-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1/2 small head Savoy cabbage, cored, thinly sliced, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

In small saucepan, combine bacon and cold water to cover. Cover, bring to boil over moderate heat, and skim foam from surface. Reduce heat and simmer 7 minutes. Drain and cool, then cut into 1-inch chunks. Set aside.

In 6-quart heavy stock pot over moderate heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add potatoes and sauté 2 minutes. Add stock, bay leaves, salt, and pepper and bring to boil. Reduce heat to moderately low, cover, and simmer until potatoes are soft, about 8 to 10 minutes. Add cabbage and simmer 5 additional minutes. Discard bay leaves. Working in 3 batches, in blender purée soup until smooth (using caution when blending hot liquids). Return to pot, stir in bacon, and rewarm if necessary.

I made some alterations based on the necessities of our household. For example, the F-word doesn't eat meat, so no bacon. I didn't mind, as frankly the idea of boiling bacon makes every molecule of my Calabrian-ity recoil in fucking disgust. If God wanted us to prepare bacon with water, he'd have made pigs aquatic. Fucking Irish, man, I love them, but boiling pigmeat? Holy fuck. I know the British do it too but that's the opposite of an excuse.

So I replaced the bacon with one-inch chunks of oily sundried tomato. We use an immersion blender because they make all other blenders look like retards unless you want to crush ice or something. It worked a treat with this recipe. And no bay leaves, so I used herb bouillon instead of the chicken stock, and then only half the reccommend salt. It was still a little over-salty.

Aside from over-saltiness, it was fucking ace. Fucking delicious. And even with the peeling, dicing, clean-up and writing to my old roommate about how she and her unemployed husband might be able to find a job in Europe, it took about 30 minutes. So it turns out that you can cook cabbage and have it be not fucking gross, as long as it's only cooked for five minutes and then puréed into oblivion. And as you can notice from the ingredient list, it probably cost a cumulative Euro.

Nice. What's not nice is this morning; I'm eating quinoa for breakfast in a sweet, fruit-laden preparation that was reccommended by this site. Goddamn hippies. It's gross! This seed is too nutty, too savoury, to be anything but shitty in a sweet preparation. Maybe in a savoury, in some version of a risotto, for example, but sweet? Icky icky icky. Listen, hippies, just because something comes from the same place as cocaine does not make it good or cool, okay? Jesus.