Currabinny Cooks: Spring Cabbage Salad with Lentils and Ginger Honey Dressing
Spring Cabbage Salad with lentils and ginger honey dressing
Is this country still haunted by over-boiled cabbage?
Is it high time we reclaimed, reinvented and reinvigorated our relationship with this hardy, useful and much-overlooked brassica?
We think so.
This process of collectively reintroducing ourselves to cabbage has of course already begun. Trendy restaurant menus feature ‘charred hispi cabbage’ as standard and you get the feeling that kimchi recipes will be passed down the generations as family secrets from now on.
This cabbage renaissance doesn’t have to be another passing fad. Hispi cabbage is also known as 'sweetheart cabbage' and is indeed great for grilling, roasting and charring but there is much to be said about using a regular old green cabbage or beautiful wrinkly savoy.
Cooking with cabbage at home doesn’t have to be boiling it to bits in salty water and it also doesn’t have to be too trendy or using varieties you can’t find in your local supermarket. There is a joy to exploring a common ingredient you may have once overlooked and finding delicious, simple ways of using it.
There is much to be delighted about with cabbages. They keep for ages in the fridge and even a small one goes a long way. One large head of green cabbage could do you for several meals.
Cabbage is brilliantly versatile: you can eat it raw, pickled, fermented, slow-baked, sautéed, blitzed, shredded, filled and yes even boiled. It doesn’t wilt away to nothing like some leafy greens. It also grows well in this particular in-between season where winters crop has come to an end and the late spring/ early summer glut has yet to be ready for harvest.
For us, our deep love of cabbage is also down to its robust, moreish, savoury but sweet flavour.
Cabbage has the ability to go with just about anything whilst also holding its own as a flavour in whatever dish you add it to. The following dishes are some of our favourite ways of cooking with cabbage. They are all easy, relatively uncomplicated dishes to knock up in no time. Feel free to play around with the kimchi recipe, make it your own and by all means pass it down to your children.
There Is little to be done in this recipe and that is the beauty of it. Cabbage soup is not something that would usually evoke any excitement but trust us, this simple little cabbage soup is perfectly delicious, filling and comforting. This is also a good base soup recipe for playing around with — adding different things such as wild garlic, watercress or different herbs.
- 1 tablespoon of olive oil or rapeseed oil
- 60g butter
- 1 medium onion, finely chopped
- 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 1 big potato, peeled and cut into small cubes
- 500g green cabbage, shredded
- 1 litre of good hot chicken or vegetable stock
- 100ml of single cream
- Sea salt and freshly-cracked black pepper
- Handful of parsley or chervil, finely chopped
Heat the oil and butter in a large saucepan or casserole over a medium-high heat. Add the onion and move around the pan for a few minutes until starting to soften and turn translucent. Add the garlic and potato and cook for another 3-4 minutes, coating everything in buttery oil. Season a little with some sea salt and black pepper. Add the cabbage next followed shortly after by the hot stock. Bring to the boil and then turn down to a gentle simmer. Cook like this until the potato is cooked all the way through.
Use a good stick blender or large food processor to blitz the soup until very smooth. Check for seasoning and then stir in the cream and garnish heavily with chopped herbs.
This is a brilliant salad for whipping up when you are short on time. You will find that it is surprisingly very filling and is bursting with flavour.
- 400g of firm cabbage (green, savoy, hispi, York are all fine)
- Bunch of spring onions, thinly sliced
- 150g cooked green or puy lentils
- 2 tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds For the dressing:
- A 'thumb' of ginger, peeled and grated
- 2 cloves of garlic, grated
- 2 tablespoons of soy sauce
- 50g honey
- 2 teaspoons of sesame oil
- 2 teaspoons of sambal oelek or similar chilli sauce
First make the dressing by combining the ginger, garlic, soy sauce, chilli sauce, honey and sesame oil in a bowl and whisk well to combine. Leave to the side.
Discard the outer leaves of cabbage until you have only tightly packed firm cabbage in your hands.
Remove the thickest part of the stem and discard as well. Finely slice the cabbage into very thin ribbons and place in a large mixing bowl along with the cooked lentils. Spoon over a generous amount of dressing and mix everything together with your hands. Serve on a nice serving platter with the spring onion slices scattered over and another few drizzles of the dressing.
We have a couple of solid kimchi recipes that we like to play around with but this one is our current favourite. Chinese cabbages are fairly easy to find nowadays but if you can’t get one just use a good green cabbage which will take a little longer to soften but will work fine. This recipe makes a fine big jar of kimchi that could last you a while but feel free to half or even quarter the recipe to suit your own needs.
- 1 chinese cabbage ( or green)
- 60g caster sugar
- 1 heaped tablespoon of sea salt
- 60g Korean chilli powder (or use red pepper or chipotle powder)
- 3 tablespoons of toasted black sesame seeds
- 60ml of soy sauce
- 4 tablespoons of sesame oil
- 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated
- 2 medium carrots, grated
- 4 spring onions, finely sliced
- A good handful of fresh coriander, chopped
- 60ml water
Half the cabbage lengthwise and then half these again until you have four long quarters. Shred into one-inch-thick slices starting at the top and getting a little thinner as you get towards the stem. Discard the very end stems. Place the shredded cabbage in a large bowl and sprinkle over the salt. You can leave this overnight and in the morning the cabbage should have leached out quite a lot of liquid.
Squeeze the cabbage with your hands to get as much residual water out of the cabbage as you can and place in a separate bowl or strainer. In another bowl, mix together the sugar, chilli powder, black sesame, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, carrots, spring onions and coriander. Mix well until you get a thick grainy paste. If it is looking too thick, thin down with a couple teaspoons of water. Add the cabbage to the marinade and transfer to a large, sterilised jar. The kimchi will be ready to eat within a couple of hours.
