Marie Cooks Skyrim: Cabbage Potato Soup

When it comes to choosing what food to eat, I think it is very important to listen to what your body is telling you. Not the part that says eat pizza for every meal – the part that says “I want mushrooms right now,” or “roasted broccoli sounds really good.” Usually, our bodies are very good at telling us what we need, if we know how to listen. Last weekend, I was craving cabbage. This is NOT usually a craving I have, but I must have been particularly deficient in vitamin C (or something) because cabbage just sounded like something I really wanted to be part of dinner. Well, perfect time for me to do some google-research of several dozen different cabbage soup recipes. This one caught my eye looking particularly delicious and I was pretty tickled to find that it had all of the ingredients from Skyrim’s cabbage, potato, and leek soup. Joe and I had this for dinner with some garlic bread and I absolutely cleaned my bowl of every last drop.

Marie cooks Skyrim: “Apple Cabbage Stew”

I used to have a bit of a problem with Skyrim. I spent *a lot* of time playing during my grad school years; for a little while my addiction was so bad I literally ran a mile home between classes to play just a few minutes before running back. One of the things I liked about the game was making food. Cooking roasted rabbit or grilled leeks in game to scarf down in the middle of a dragon fight always made me crave hearty winter food. Even now, whenever Joe makes beef stew or split pea soup I will have a fleeting desire to play Skyrim again. I don’t play as much anymore (thank goodness) but I never quite shook the silly desire to make every single in-game food in real life.

One of the most memorable dishes in Skyrim is Apple Cabbage Stew. Which sounds, frankly, gross. I was able to find several dishes for broth soups with apple and cabbage, but these didn’t really seem appealing to me. In addition I don’t like calling a thin soup “stew,” since I think of stew as having a thicker texture. However, braised cabbage with apple is a traditional German recipe. This seemed to me the best place to start when trying to find an apple cabbage recipe that would actually taste good.  I saved a handful of different versions of braised or fried cabbage and apples that looked tasty and told myself I would make them some day.

On a recent rainy day, I found myself with an abundance of cabbage left over from makingIndian Spiced Cabbage and Onion Patties and decided to go ahead and try one of the recipes I had saved. This one is based on a Southern fried cabbage recipe and I found it surprisingly delicious. It has a sweet-and-sour taste and good texture and would pair well with sausage or pork roast, although I completely devoured my bowl full on its own, without any accompaniment.

Easy Indian At Home: Cabbage and Onion Patties with Green Chutney

I have been wanting to buy Madhur Jaffrey’s “Vegetarian India” for a long time. Although I do not keep to a vegetarian diet, and although I do love chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, goat vindaloo, lamb biryani and more, some of my favorite dishes every time I go out for Indian food are the dals, chana masala and other vegetarian dishes. I finally  ordered Jaffrey’s cookbook a couple weeks ago and immediately bookmarked nearly every page. The first two recipes I made last weekend were simple and delicious, but made me feel accomplished nonetheless.