Hot cabbage with butter and caraway
Eight minutes, one euro, and a side that goes with anything. The cheapest vegetable in the shop, made to count.
One portion
Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.
Ingredients
- 500 g Cabbage
- 100 g Onions
- 60 g Butter
- 15 g Lard
- 3 g Caraway
- 15 ml Vinegar
- 1.5 g Salt · sodium
- 0.5 g Black pepper
How it's made
4 stepsBig screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.
- Shred the cabbage a finger wide and slice the onion. Throw away the hard core.
- Big pan on high heat with the lard. When it's hot, in with the onion and caraway, 2 minutes.
- Add all the cabbage at once. Stir every 30 seconds for 5 minutes — you want browned edges, not boiled cabbage. If the pan is too full, do it in two batches.Cabbage that browns at the edges turns sweet and takes on a nutty flavour. Cabbage steamed in its own water stays a sad vegetable.
- Heat off. Butter, vinegar, salt, pepper. Stir until the butter melts and it's done.
The plan’s fallback side: under a euro, eight minutes, and it goes with absolutely anything on the list.
Cabbage is the underrated vegetable in this diet. It soaks up fat like a sponge, it’s low in potassium compared with almost any other vegetable, it keeps a fortnight in the fridge without spoiling, and it costs a euro a head. When you want bulk on the plate with no carbohydrate and no money, it’s the answer.
Lard for frying, butter at the end. Lard takes high heat without burning, and cabbage needs high heat to brown rather than steam. Butter added at the end stays butter: you taste it, and it takes the side up to 300 calories a portion.
Caraway, not cumin. Two different plants, and Romanian mixes them up constantly. Caraway — the aniseed-tasting seed that belongs with cabbage — is the one here. Cumin, the one from Middle Eastern cooking, belongs with minced meat, not here.
Photo: Stir-fried cabbage and chicken gizzard by pelican, licence BY-SA 2.0.