Meat, meat, meat! You’d think that’s all I eat from the posts I’ve put up so far. I eat quite a bit of vegetables. Typically, I have a cooking marathon on the weekend and make some meat dishes to portion and freeze. The veggies, if not included in the meat dish, are pretty free form for the rest of the week. For example, I like to shred up cabbage and carrots and make stir fries with ghee or grass-fed butter and coconut aminos (paleo soy sauce). I hope this blog will help me incorporate a better variety of veggie recipes. In this post, I’m making nomnompaleo.com's "World’s Best Braised Green Cabbage." World's best? This is crying for a review!
As I mentioned above, I like shredding cabbage for stir fries. I actually had a large amount of cabbage I needed to cook before it went bad, so I decided to be a rebel and try this recipe with shredded cabbage rather than wedged as the recipe calls for. I’ve made it with the wedges before so I was fairly confident the result would be the same. I did decide to cut the cook times by 15 minutes as I figured it would cook quicker shredded.
Here are my ingredients:
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| Don't worry. The dark spots on the green cabbage are actually purple cabbage and not something sinister. |
I chopped up the carrot and sliced the onions.
I greased the casserole dish with grass-fed ghee. I’ve done this before with coconut oil and it worked fine as well. I just got this jar of ghee after seeing it was Whole30 approved. So far, I like it. Its a little pricey, so I don’t know if I’ll use it regularly. I’ll see how long this jar lasts me.
I filled the casserole dish with cabbage, topped it with the onions and carrots and then poured some of my homemade chicken broth and ghee over the top. I realized after I poured my broth and ghee that I forgot to take a picture of that. Drat!
I put it in the oven for its first 45 minutes of cooking.
After 45 minutes, I opened it up and stirred it and closed up the oven for another 45 minutes.
I then turned up the heat and let it go for about another 15 minutes. I’m lucky that a Penzey’s Spices recently opened in Austin, so I had some Aleppo pepper to sprinkle on the top of the cabbage.
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| The cabbage was only a little more brown after the last 15 minutes. |
Ingredient Accessibility: Everything in this recipe is pretty accessible. The ingredient list limits the fat choices to lard, ghee or bacon grease, but coconut oil works just fine. The last step she lists sprinkling fleur de sel - I don't have this and haven’t looked for it. I know there are all sorts of salts out there and I’m game to try all sorts of spices/herbs, but I don’t feel any compulsion to try this one. The Aleppo pepper, from Penzey’s was worth getting but definitely not necessary for the dish.
Cook time: The cook time on this recipe is the only drawback. Even cutting the time to 45 minutes for the shredded cabbage, its just too much time, for me, to make on a week night.
The Paleo Review: Thumbs up! The braising really brings out the natural sweetness in the cabbage. A nice change. World's best? As I've not had better, I'll let it keeps its title, for now.