Do you think this is cabbage?

Another week of summer has flown by! Where has June gone? But, with the passing weeks comes a different variety of CSA produce. This week, I received Napa Cabbage, bok choy, kale, zucchini, and lettuce. I haven’t gotten any cabbage or zucchini up until this point, so I thought I would make a dish with those ingredients. However, when I got my produce home, I wasn’t even sure if I had cabbage!

When I brought my produce home, I sorted the different vegetables on the kitchen table. I had a large bunched vegetable that looked like a type of lettuce, but it didn’t taste lettuce-like. I should really start paying more attention to what I am getting when I pick up my produce! 

So, I did some investigation work online. I had a hunch that the bunched vegetable was cabbage, but I have never seen cabbage that looked like this before. Like I said earlier, it looked more like lettuce (romaine lettuce to be exact). So I googled “different types of cabbage” and looked through the images. I found an image that looked very similar to what I had and clicked on it. It turned out that I did in fact have cabbage! The cabbage I had was not your typical “grocery store” cabbage. It was a Chinese cabbage called Napa Cabbage. This cabbage tastes different than the type of cabbage I am used to. When I bit off a chunk of a leaf, it tasted pretty bitter.
I knew it was something I didn’t really want to eat raw. I could probably add it to a salad mix and hide the “bitter” taste, but I decided to look for a recipe that cooked the bitterness away. When I found a recipe that cooked the cabbage and even included cayenne pepper, I knew I would like it. So, here it is!

Week 4, recipe 1: Stir Fried Spiced Cabbage Ingredients: 1 lb Napa Cabbage 2 tbsp sugar 2 tbsp white vinegar 1 tsp salt ¼ tsp cayenne pepper 1 tbsp oil (olive, vegetable – your choice) Preparation: After washing and drying cabbage; chop each cabbage leaf into approximately 1 inch x 1 inch pieces. In a small bowl, combine sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, salt, and cayenne pepper. Leave the oil out to put into your wok. Pour your oil into the wok; heat your wok and oil (swirl the oil in the wok). After about 30 seconds, turn your heat down and add the cabbage to the wok. Stir fry the cabbage for about 3 minutes (no longer than 5 minutes). Remove the wok from heat and stir in the soy sauce/vinegar mixture. Transfer the cabbage into a serving bowl and let cool to lukewarm before serving. Or, if you prefer, serve chilled.

This dish was pretty tasty, but the cabbage was a tad on the chewy side. But, I would prepare this recipe again because it was a good tasting, healthy side dish. I even mixed up the dish by throwing in some ingredients not listed in the recipe! I added zucchini and mushrooms. I love stir fried mushrooms, and zucchini tastes better cooked than raw (in my book), so I knew they would be a good compliment to the cabbage.

I stir fried the zucchini and mushrooms separately from the cabbage. I threw the chopped zucchini and mushrooms in a wok with some olive oil and stirred them around for about 3 minutes. I removed them from the heat and added them to my cabbage dish. The results were even better than just cabbage alone!