THE CONTRACTOR COOKBOOK (tm)
Taylor’s partner Noa wrote this weekend to ask for the recipe for a cabbage soup I had offered the guys last month.
The weekend’s snow has turned to rain (thank goodness, no shoveling required today) so I am responding to her request by kicking off an idea I’ve had for a while - to consecrate in e-pamphlet form a compendium of those delicacies prepared for the Frontera crew over the course of the build these many months - to show appreciation for their work ethic and talent.
Before we started renovating one witty sub told me “Contractors are like bears, if you feed them they keep coming back.”. I stowed the aphorism away. Indeed, on some of the toughest days of the build a steaming tray of biscuits dissolved the tension and reminded us all of common purpose.I have not included snack as a budget item - but I would allow $5 per day for even the simplest fare. If your build were to take say 320 days, it would add $1600 to the bottom line. And so herewith - the first in a series of recipes.
The Contractor Cookbook (tm)
Recipe One - Brassica Maxima Soup with Ginger, Turmeric & Chinese Five Spice
Dedicated to Taylor McCarthy, principal of Frontera Homes and our GC
The idea came from Liz Cage (aka Labs 4 You doggie doyenne) who had decided to sup for a week on nothing but cabbage soup. This I could not face - but a big steaming pot of cabbage soup to share sounded very nice as a winter warmer/ antidote to too many holiday treats. There are scads of recipes under “the cabbage soup diet” on the net. My riff uses “Better Than Bouillon Seasoned Vegetable base” and locally grown organic veggies from The Local General Store - our wonderful grocer on Haultain. I believe the Chinese Spice cum grinder came from The Gladstone grocery off Fernwood Road owned by South Africans. The label on the bottle says produced in South Africa. Here goes:
Roughly chop a whole head of cabbage. Set aside
Thinly slice one large onion, 3 shallots and a whole head of peeled garlic - put in a large pot with a little olive oil and gently cook until they turn golden
Grind Chinese Spice (sea salt, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, clove, star anise and sesame seeds) onto the onion, garlic & shallots, let sit a minute, then
Add 8 or more cups of water to the pot and stir in 3 tablespoons of the bouillon paste - enough to generously cover the cabbage, then add the cabbage to the pot. Cook on medium heat.
Cut 3 celery sticks and 4 carrots into chunks - toss them in the pot
Peel and dice 2 thumbs worth of ginger and 2 ring fingers worth of turmeric add to pot .
Set aside a fistful of spinach or Swiss chard to add in the last 5 minutes
Set aside a lemon or lime to add the juice at the last moment
Cook the mess for 25 mixtures and then add the reserved spinach or chard. When wilted squeeze fresh lemon.
Serve steaming hot. The soup has healing attributes and an enlivening effect on mood and energy. It is best on day one, tolerable reheated day two - but thereafter is too limp and skunky to bother with. Hence best to share fresh. Enough for at least 8 bowls of soup.
A book box footnote. One of the great charms of Victoria is the high concentration of book boxes. I cannot pass one by without taking a gander. Imagine my delight on a recent walk when a box contained a deaccessioned copy of The Fine Art of Salad Gardening by E. Annie Proulx. Of course it has a section on cabbage (below). Before winning the Pulitzer Prize for Shipping News, moving to Wyoming and penning Brokeback Mountain, Proulx made her living as a journalist homesteading in Vermont. She wrote ten books in all during this time- my favorite title being “Make Your Own Insulated Window Shutters”. I just discovered a divine blog post by Amy Stewart (whose Wicked Plants is in my library) about the early career of the late-blooming Annie Proulx. She quotes
“What’s reflected in my fiction did not so much jump from manuals on grape growing and fence mending as from very serious academic hours in libraries and archives and an inborn curiosity about life.”
Indeed her early books of non fiction are wonderful too. Proulx observes: “Wild cabbage of good flavor still grows along the chalk cliffs of England and France. This weedy plant is the ancient ancestor of our thick-headed domestic types. The Egyptians, who had unusual relationships with vegetables, are said to have worshipped cabbage, and the Greeks worked it into their mythology and the solidified product of the pearls of sweat that stood on Jupiter’s brow as he tried to puzzle out two contradictory oracles. The Romans were under the impression that cabbage leaves eaten before a banquet could stave off drunkenness, and John Gerard, writing centuries later, explained this by citing such animosity between grapevines and cabbages , that the vines would die if cabbage were planted nearby - hence the power of cabbages over wine.”
I have more respect than ever for cabbages and will start listening to Proulx’s Barkskins sometime this week. I also mean to learn more about Amy Stewart.
