Endlessly crunchable. Easy to store. No refrigeration required. I think cabbage might rank up there as one of the most perfect vegetables for cruisers.
Cabbage? Really cabbage. Sure, it’s high in fiber, high in vitamin C. It’s often inexpensive, but not exactly the case here in French Polynesia. But why do I think that cabbage might rank up there with onions and garlic as a perfect cruiser vegetable?
Well, it’s long-lasting without refrigeration. You can carry a lot of it with you when you go places and still have vegetables, when most of the other ones might not be around. But cabbage! Cabbage! The immediate mental association is of a vaguely institutional lingering stench? Yeah, OK, fine, overcook the stuff, you’ll be reminded about because of the nice lingering sulfury smell for days. But who says you have to overcook it?
Ten uses for cabbage in no particular order, and there are way, way, way more than ten. Just do a quick Google for recipes, and you’re gonna find them, and there are a ton in The Boat Galley Cookbook.
But how do I use cabbage on board, in no particular order? Shred it up, finely shredded as a taco topping. Or to add bulk to soup or stew. We had chicken last night, and I chopped up a couple of leaves of cabbage to put in while I was cooking the chicken. You can make cabbage rolls, deconstructed ones, or just regular ones. I use it often as a stand-in for celery or some other largely tasteless, mostly there for crunch ingredient in things like chicken salad. I use it raw. I don’t cook it in that way.
Kimchi. I haven’t made it yet, but boy, do I like the taste of it! That spicy, garlicy Korean condiment. There’s a great recipe for kimchi coming from cruiser friend John Herlig that’s part of the Storing Food Without Refrigeration book.
I will often start sautéing up some onions and some garlic, and then I’ll throw in some shredded cabbage as a bulky way to add things to a stir-fry. Add some extra ginger to it, and I’ve got a really great start to a good stir-fry where the other vegetables can serve a more highlighty sort of a route, particularly if you don’t have a lot of extra vegetables.
You can make coleslaw. I’ll make coleslaw with a traditional mayonnaise-based dressing, and I’ll also do a cabbage salad that is made with a vinaigrette, and that’s just spectacular. I use cabbage as a more substantial substitute for lettuce when I’m doing things like beef lettuce wraps, which I tend to make with lentils and not beef because I don’t often have access to beef out here.
Saurkraut. You can make your own saurkraut. Fermenting is the new thing, right?
You can roast cabbage. Chop it into wedges. Roast it or grill it. The edges just get brown and caramelized. Oh wow, it’s delicious. Cabbage is great any place that you could use more crunch, more vegetables, more bulk.
How do I keep my cabbage? I keep mine in the veg bin (Amazon). It’s in the dark, airy space in the bookshelf underneath the side deck. And I use it by pulling off the leaves. I don’t cut it in half and shred it that way, although that definitely makes nicer, thinner shreds and shards. But if you pull off the leaves and you work it out from the outside in, only at the end do I chop into it as a whole thing. And, yeah, sometimes it starts to go off, and you can smell it. Sorry. But you can rescue the cabbage. You don’t have to throw the whole thing out. You can cut off just the rotten part, and then when that happens, using up the rest of that cabbage moves to the top of the use-it list. So that might be, oh, we’re just gonna have some cabbage rolls, or we’re going to make a stir-fry with an awful lot of cabbage as a big part of the vegetable.
Cabbage is an incredibly versatile nutrition powerhouse that has the added benefit of being relatively easy to find–and that’s with an asterisk. Anybody listening who’s in French Polynesia, you kind of have to make sure that you get to the supply ship when it comes in, because sometimes those cabbages go quickly from the shelves. So get to the ship and buy it that way. It’s pretty easy to find it. It lasts for a really long time. When other vegetables are a thing of the past, we know we always have cabbage on the boat.
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