I’ve eaten a bunch of steamed cabbage recently. I love the flavor, and if you give it just the right amount of sweetness, it is a delicious side dish. But, salt & margarine, and maybe some bacon grease can only go so far. I thought, what might spiff up steamed cabbage, and immediately thought of adding a mustard sauce. *I really, really, really don’t know why I thought of a mustard sauce. I hadn’t seen anything, recently about this, and I don’t think I’ve ever had steamed cabbage with a mustard sauce. It may be like the time I was walking down an isle in my local Walmart and thought that I might like to make hummus at home. There were the cans of garbanzo beans on the shelf, so I chose one (may have been Hanover), took it home and googled on how to make hummus. I like making hummus, every so often, and having a veggie meal, with olives, smoked oysters, sweet bell pepper and sweet onion, carrot sticks, etc. Surprisingly, even though I like celery, I don’t like celery and hummus. **Not all canned garbanzo beans are equal;-) I found that some companies cooked their beans longer, some shorter. So the canned product may either be too hard, or not. And, when I first made hummus at home, I was using my older, smaller, Braun chopper (came with a chopper, whisk, & stick blender) which wasn’t powerful enough to grind an entire can of garbanzo beans into hummus. I since bought a larger Braun unit which has no problem with a whole can of garbanzo beans. ***The chopper also does excellently on making homemade salsa.
So, I thought “mustard sauce” and googled for a recipe, if that was a valid food combination. Sure enough I quickly found a Cabbage with Mustard Sauce recipe online and looked. It seemed to be a very easy recipe. Steam the cabbage wedges. Sautee diced onion in olive oil. When translucent, remove the onions from the oil. Add a small amount of flour to the oil, then some milk, and finally add the onions back to this sauce. Pour the sauce over the steamed cabbage wedges, and then sprinkle with black pepper. *The recipe is simple, and I even wrote the above from memory. That is something I just memorized about 30 minutes ago. And since, I’ve been online buying microplane spice grinders, Grains of Paradise, and Indian Long Peppers for Christmas presents, via Amazon.com, but came back to write this entry.
I have no illusions that these gifts will be appreciated, or even used, except for the Grains of Paradise. This was a gift that I gave to Danny a couple of years ago, and he mentioned it to me in thanking me for it sometime later. So, I’m planning to give Danny another package of Grains of Paradise seeds this year for Christmas. **I did see online that there is an Alligator Pepper from West Africa. They appear to be pods, which have seeds in them. But then I noted that these seeds are actually Grains of Paradise. Who knew? Certainly not me.
I gave a small sample of the Indian Long Peppers last year as Christmas presents, and no one let me know, “yea or nay” as to them. But, they are difficult to process, with a special pepper mill, or a mortar & pestle (which most probably do not have). I even found using the mortar & pestle mildly difficult. You had to hold your hand over the bowl so that the pepper being ground did not jump out.
So, I’ve been happy with the special “microplane” grinder that I found online. This grinder will grind nutmeg (probably the most “wear & tear” on the grinder), Indian Long Pepper, cinnamon, and various other hard spices. This grinder was well planned and even had a storage compartment in the top grinding handle… but, it is made of a hard plastic, and the threads to the storage compartment seized up and I haven’t been able to twist it open for quite a while. I just add my Indian Long Peppers from an external source and the grinder works fine!
NOTE [ 11/17/23 ]: So after several months, probably 4 – 6, I tried again to open the storage part of the grinder, and today, the seal broke and I was able to get to the contents inside. I found quite a few Long Peppers in it, and took them out and put most of them in the grinder. But later I found that the grinder wouldn’t function properly with too many items, so I took all but a couple of peppers out, and the grinder works fine.
From a comment that Lawrence made some time ago, I’m not going to give him an assortment of flavored teas… although, I wouldn’t mind getting an assortment. Well, I probably wouldn’t want an assortment because I already know what I like and have a pretty good selection at home of what I regularly like: Constant Comment & Earl Grey being my longtime favorites (probably the 1980s and Rick & Linda Bell). Finding Chris, what a horror that must have been. And Raspberry Royal from my trip to Lynchburg, VA. I have several other flavored teas, but none repeatedly satisfy like the three mentioned above.
This microplane grinder was extremely well thought out. I put it in a similar category to the old Northwest Airlines logo, which I deem as the perfect logo for an English speaking audience. Their old logo consisted of two interconnected images. There was a circle with a small triangle pointing to the northwest quadrant, signifying a compass pointing NW. But, the small triangle also helped form an italicized N into a W. Wow, what a brilliant creation. I’ve never seen any other logo that spoke so well, with no wasted space. “This was poetry.”
So, I made the mustard sauce this afternoon and hated it. There wasn’t enough mustard, and I’m not sure if there ever could be enough mustard. I tried adding some horseradish and that wasn’t the right direction. I tried adding some Splenda, because I do like a sweetness to my steamed cabbage, but nothing actually worked. I did try some other BBQ type sauces, and mixing horseradish with them, but had no steamed cabbage to try those sauces on. One sauce had a tomato-ey base and the other a mustard-ey base, and I like both, but not sure either would add to steamed cabbage. **Just saw a suggestion to flavor the steamed cabbage with Soy Sauce. I like Soy Sauce, and that would be a different direction for flavoring. But that also gets me thinking about Toasted Sesame Oil, which I equate with fried rice. Perhaps Soy Sauce & Toasted Sesame Oil together would be a good combo with steamed cabbage. But, might be too overpowering depending upon what else it is served with.
[NOTE 02/16/24]: As I said above, I hated the mustard sauce from the recipe above that included flour, but just recently I wanted to try mustard (yellow) on some steamed cabbage. I added some of the Creamy Horseradish from Inglehoff, and some Splenda Sweetener, and put this on the cabbage, and it was good. [end NOTE]
Bill Gibson, II 