So, after weeks of being out of town, rushing around, eating anything but natural food, we're floundering to work our way through our produce, meat, and the like that is piling up in our fridge. As Liz is working at The Wolf and I'm only somewhat getting my butt in gear, the responsibility of making sure we don't starve (unlikely) and our food does not rot has been left up to me. As everyone knows, I'm not our ringer. Pretty much all I can do is follow directions. This is why I prefer baking. This dinner was a prime example of:
A. My propensity for screwing up easy foods
B. The impossibility of screwing up cabbage
C. My overall fear of cooking sausages (I don't know why)
Anyway, the goal was to crack into a package of German wieners Ms. Flauto brought back from the Holland, MI farmers' market. I had planned to make a potato salad (therefore saving some red potatoes from certain demise), sautéed cabbage (from our CSA box), and said wieners. What occurred was some facsimile of that menu and much sturm und drang.
Step 1 cook wieners.
I know this should have been easy, but I never know when they're done. I don't know when to add water. It just makes me anxious. Nonetheless, tasty.
Step 2 make potatoes.
Okay, I admit it, I was boiling potatoes while trying to finish watching an episode of Boston Legal. I'm addicted. Denny and Alan fascinate me, Julie Bowen is hilarious, and, well I needn't even qualify Candice Bergen. Anyway, I over-boiled the potatoes, thought I could just switch to mashed, and discovered that I had created wallpaper paste. Fail.
Step 3 stomp around kitchen and come up with alternative plan.
Easy schmeasy back-up plan = boil a couple servings off egg noodles until they're done, drain, add 2T butter and a random amount of your new random dried herb. (Liz told me to use it but never figured out what it was)
Step 4 make cabbage.
My recipe was based on the this recipe (see link).
I cut the recipe in half and used what I had.
Ingredients
1/4 head of cabbage
2T butter
1 diced yellow onion
Salt and pepper to taste
1.5T apple cider vinegar
So, just melt the butter in a skillet. Cut the onion into slivers and sautée in butter until translucent. Rough chop the cabbage and sautée with onion, salt, pepper, and vinegar. Cook on medium to medium high for, well, as long as it takes. The recipe said 60-90 minutes. I think I did more like 45. It was lovely.
Step 5 wait for Liz to come home and cross fingers that food is not awful. (it is a disadvantage that I don't like to taste while cooking. Luckily I broke this rule with the potatoes.
ELIZABETH * JULY 11 * DINNER
Here's the thing: she's not really a bad cook. Adventurous? No. Improvisational? Nyet. Edible? Totally. The cabbage was astonishingly tasty. It came out so sweet and succulent and delicious I thought it had sugar in it. The wiener was fine. They are very good sausages from 20th Century Meat Market - you would have to really try to screw them up. They are smoked wieners for Pete's sake. I don't know what herb it was on the noodles - it came in the CSA box. Maybe marjoram? Anyway again, noodles + butter + fresh herb = yum. When Kelly is the wife, it is home cookin, but really, what's wrong with that?
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