From the Ground to the Table

I have no vegetable garden and yet I have more fresh veggies than I can eat.

Veggie gardeners are very generous people. This week I have cabbage and redskins from my Dad, cukes from him and two other people, and tomatoes from my MIL. This morning I decided to turn that head of cabbage into many, many meals.

This is my Dad's garden. You would be hard pressed to find a weed in the whole garden. And look at that huge hedge that hides the garden from the house. Years ago he dug the cedar from a friend's cow pasture...imagine that!



Anyway back to my cooking..........I decided to make cabbage/hamburger/rice casserole. It's like stuffed cabbage, only the cabbage is shredded instead of stuffed. DH likes cabbage like that.

Since I will have a big mess to clean up, I decided I might as well make a lot (I am an avid multi-tasker). With 2.5 pounds of ground chuck, I decided I had enough to make three casseroles.
I will freeze two of them. In mid-December I am sure one of the casseroles will be very tasty and will remind me of the summer garden.

I don't have a recipe, but here are the step-by-step pictures of what I did (I wanted to remember just how I made it, so I can repeat it at a later date.) Most recipes I see use only tomato soup, which I find boring on it's own. I added beef broth (instead of water), vinegar and brown sugar. The vinegar gives it a little zing.


After I finished the 3 casseroles, I made parsley-buttered redskins.


I can hardly wait for dinner!

While we are on the subject of PB redskins, let me share my big pet peeve about them. . . I hate getting them at a restaurant when they are served in big chunks - like only cut in half. Our cooks at work do it all the time. I guess they find it too labor intensive to cut them into bite-size pieces.

If you cut them into tiny pieces, the ratio of flesh to skin is increased. With more flesh exposed more butter is absorbed into each bite. So if you like butter, they really do taste better if they are cut smaller! At least that's my theory...I have really never heard any professional chef mention it...