Braised cabbage with chorizo and chickpeas
In trying times the roasting tin takes centre stage. As enjoyable a means of wasting time as flip-flipping between multiple hobs at once can be, every so often you want to cook, serve, and eat a meal where the oven's done most of the work. Today's recipe is one of those meals.
OK, it isn't quite a Diana Henry-style bung-it-straight-in-the-oven-and-hope-for-the-best job but the hob-work is so easy and stress-free that it might as well be.
The combination of cabbage, chickpeas, and chorizo gives the dish a (given the blog, fittingly) Spanish feel, though you could quite easily make the case for it being a pan-Mediterranean meal as befitting of a dinner table in Cadiz as it is one on Crete. Just swap the chorizo for your local highly spiced and super fatty sausage and you're away. I can only begin to image, in fact, how ludicriously tasty the combination of sweet cabbage and merguez would be.
Whatever sausage you go for, this one's a winner. The recipe comes from gap-toothed master of the Wahaca empire, Thomasina Miers. A cheap and cheerful dish, it'll easily serve four.
Drinkswise, you'll likely have abou 2/3 of a bottle of red left over from the cooking so why not combine it with some ice cold Coca Cola for a kalimotxo? Hangovers don't exist in a world where the world barely exists, do they?
Ingredients:
4 tbsp olive oil
200g chorizo sliced however you see fit (Thomasina states 150g in the OG recipe but as most of your standard supermarket rings of the stuff weigh in at 200g you might as well use it all)
4 garlic cloves (Smashed out of their skins and then hammered in a pestle and mortar if you can be bothered, knived itno hefty chunks if not)
2 hispi cabbages, outer leaves removed and halved through the stem (My local ASDA only had tenderheart in stock so I used that. Chinese leaf would probably do the trick too, and possibly savoy cabbage at a push)
2 tins of chickpeas (Rinsed, obviously)
400g tin plum tomatoes (Chopped are a more than adequate replacement)
1 tsp smoked paprika
200ml rioja (other similarly full-bodied reds are available but this is a good excuse to break that £7 barrier and buy an on-offer bottle of Campo Viejo)
A few sprigs thyme
Creme fraiche or natural yoghurt
1 handful parsley, roughly chopped (optional but recommended)
Method:
Kick things off by pre-heating the oven at 200 or so. While that's whirring into action, add half the olive oil to a warmed frying pan followed by the sliced chorizo and smashed garlic. Let two of the more pungent of the store cupboard staples mingle until both are browned and reeking. Use a slotted spoon to decant them into seperate bowls; keep the garlic nearby and the chorizo at a distance to minimise the possibility of eating it all before you serve dinner. Allow yourself two, three, four, five, or six small chunks of punchy, fatty pleasure and no more.
Plonk your cabbage cut-side down in the pan until it starts to pick up a little colour - this shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Once green has met the sticky terracotta glaze of rendered animal, remove the cabbage and place in your roasting tin. You'll need to do this in batches.
Once the cabbage is done to your liking, add the tomatoes, chickpeas, paprika, garlic, wine, and additiona oil to the frying pan. It'll start to bubble and hiss and for a minute you'll swear you were on an Andulasian farmsted rather than stood in a kitchen in South London. Such is the pleasure of cooking. Anyway, add the thyme at this juncture and let the whole thing simmer away for five minutes or so. You'll want the sauce to reduce and be less ostentatiously alcoholic than it was when you poured all that rioja into it.
Reduced and ready, it's now time to pour the resulting pulse paradise over your braised brassicas. Tightly cover the roasting tin with foil and bung in the oven for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes remove the foil, add the chorizo back into the tin, and then get it back into the oven for a final five minutes.
At some point during the roasting process finely chop your parsley and add it to a few dollops of either creme fraiche or yoghurt. You could - and I did - also add a few grated cloves of garlic to the herby yoghurt for a slightly piquant finish.
Serve the braised cabbage and chickpeas in deep bowls. As ever, crusty bread is a good idea.
Playlist:
To accompany another pretty rustic - but rockin' - meal, I've assembled a playlist that's both rockin' and rustic. We kick off with Laura Allan's Laurel Canyon classic "Opening Up to You", a track that quite frankly I'd like to live in. The last minute is one of the most flat out pleasurable 60 seconds in the history of music.
We then hitch a ride to the beach alongside Hawiian pop-folk group Kalapana and Numerou Group troubador Jack Adkins, who treat us to a pair of deeply-tanned sundowners, tinged with the kind of pleasant melancholy that sets in at the end of a day by the sea.
With sand in our hair, we get our hands muddy with a back to back pairing of ragged folky numbers courtesy of Fairport Convention and dear old Richard and Linda Thompson. Both songs, the Thompson's earthy classic "When I Get to the Border" and Fairport's epic and unspooling "A Sailor's Life" make this cook want to go fell walking in the Peak District, never bothering to return to the humdrum reality of life in London.
Neil Young brings us back to the matter at hand with this shaggy number from On the Beach. At this point in the playlist, you'll be forgiven if you just put on that LP in full.
If you've managed to resist the lure of Young at his most miserable and melodic, you'll be rewarded with all six minutes of the Flying Burrito Brothers' take on "Wild Horses". Two things here:
1) Do you remember - please say you remember - that weird period maybe 15 years ago or so now when it felt like the entire world was suddenly delcaring in unison that the Flying Burrito Brothers were the best group ever and that Gram Parsons himself was quite possibly God? That happened, right? People suddenly got 'into' Americana in a big way? Did that happen? Outside of the pages of Uncut and Mojo was this a thing? If so, who was responsible?
2) "Wild Horses" is the best Rolling Stones song that isn't "Miss You". And that's a fact!
Linda Ronstadt's here to pick you up off the floor after Gram and the boys have left you weeping into your compost bin with the peacocking strut of "You're No Good" - the sort of record that justifies the continuing existence of America, sounding as it does like a stroll down the Main Street of popular mythology. To these ears at least.
We head just south of the border for our pentultimate tune, El Chicano's loose-limbed and undeniably 'funky' (sometimes it's the only word that'll do, however utterly fucking jank it is) "Tell Her She's Lovely", which you'll be singing in the direction of your cabbage as you whip her out of the oven to admire the orange-splattered leaves in all their rich glory.
We end on a burst of pure, unbridled joy in the shape of Lesley Duncan's utterly ebulliant "I Can See Where I'm Going" a song I first heard in Norwegian selector Eden Rock's essential "An Autumn Mix" which the ever-reliable Test Pressing put out a few years ago. It's a song that simply fucking soars taking me far, far away from all this, whatever this is.
Cooking and music: the only things we can rely on in this life.
Salud!
OK, it isn't quite a Diana Henry-style bung-it-straight-in-the-oven-and-hope-for-the-best job but the hob-work is so easy and stress-free that it might as well be.
The combination of cabbage, chickpeas, and chorizo gives the dish a (given the blog, fittingly) Spanish feel, though you could quite easily make the case for it being a pan-Mediterranean meal as befitting of a dinner table in Cadiz as it is one on Crete. Just swap the chorizo for your local highly spiced and super fatty sausage and you're away. I can only begin to image, in fact, how ludicriously tasty the combination of sweet cabbage and merguez would be.
Whatever sausage you go for, this one's a winner. The recipe comes from gap-toothed master of the Wahaca empire, Thomasina Miers. A cheap and cheerful dish, it'll easily serve four.
Drinkswise, you'll likely have abou 2/3 of a bottle of red left over from the cooking so why not combine it with some ice cold Coca Cola for a kalimotxo? Hangovers don't exist in a world where the world barely exists, do they?
 |
| A truly humble platter |
Ingredients:
4 tbsp olive oil
200g chorizo sliced however you see fit (Thomasina states 150g in the OG recipe but as most of your standard supermarket rings of the stuff weigh in at 200g you might as well use it all)
4 garlic cloves (Smashed out of their skins and then hammered in a pestle and mortar if you can be bothered, knived itno hefty chunks if not)
2 hispi cabbages, outer leaves removed and halved through the stem (My local ASDA only had tenderheart in stock so I used that. Chinese leaf would probably do the trick too, and possibly savoy cabbage at a push)
2 tins of chickpeas (Rinsed, obviously)
400g tin plum tomatoes (Chopped are a more than adequate replacement)
1 tsp smoked paprika
200ml rioja (other similarly full-bodied reds are available but this is a good excuse to break that £7 barrier and buy an on-offer bottle of Campo Viejo)
A few sprigs thyme
Creme fraiche or natural yoghurt
1 handful parsley, roughly chopped (optional but recommended)
Method:
Kick things off by pre-heating the oven at 200 or so. While that's whirring into action, add half the olive oil to a warmed frying pan followed by the sliced chorizo and smashed garlic. Let two of the more pungent of the store cupboard staples mingle until both are browned and reeking. Use a slotted spoon to decant them into seperate bowls; keep the garlic nearby and the chorizo at a distance to minimise the possibility of eating it all before you serve dinner. Allow yourself two, three, four, five, or six small chunks of punchy, fatty pleasure and no more.
Plonk your cabbage cut-side down in the pan until it starts to pick up a little colour - this shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Once green has met the sticky terracotta glaze of rendered animal, remove the cabbage and place in your roasting tin. You'll need to do this in batches.
Once the cabbage is done to your liking, add the tomatoes, chickpeas, paprika, garlic, wine, and additiona oil to the frying pan. It'll start to bubble and hiss and for a minute you'll swear you were on an Andulasian farmsted rather than stood in a kitchen in South London. Such is the pleasure of cooking. Anyway, add the thyme at this juncture and let the whole thing simmer away for five minutes or so. You'll want the sauce to reduce and be less ostentatiously alcoholic than it was when you poured all that rioja into it.
 |
At some point during the roasting process finely chop your parsley and add it to a few dollops of either creme fraiche or yoghurt. You could - and I did - also add a few grated cloves of garlic to the herby yoghurt for a slightly piquant finish.
Serve the braised cabbage and chickpeas in deep bowls. As ever, crusty bread is a good idea.
 |
| And here it is - an ochre-splattered delight. |
Playlist:
To accompany another pretty rustic - but rockin' - meal, I've assembled a playlist that's both rockin' and rustic. We kick off with Laura Allan's Laurel Canyon classic "Opening Up to You", a track that quite frankly I'd like to live in. The last minute is one of the most flat out pleasurable 60 seconds in the history of music.
We then hitch a ride to the beach alongside Hawiian pop-folk group Kalapana and Numerou Group troubador Jack Adkins, who treat us to a pair of deeply-tanned sundowners, tinged with the kind of pleasant melancholy that sets in at the end of a day by the sea.
With sand in our hair, we get our hands muddy with a back to back pairing of ragged folky numbers courtesy of Fairport Convention and dear old Richard and Linda Thompson. Both songs, the Thompson's earthy classic "When I Get to the Border" and Fairport's epic and unspooling "A Sailor's Life" make this cook want to go fell walking in the Peak District, never bothering to return to the humdrum reality of life in London.
Neil Young brings us back to the matter at hand with this shaggy number from On the Beach. At this point in the playlist, you'll be forgiven if you just put on that LP in full.
If you've managed to resist the lure of Young at his most miserable and melodic, you'll be rewarded with all six minutes of the Flying Burrito Brothers' take on "Wild Horses". Two things here:
1) Do you remember - please say you remember - that weird period maybe 15 years ago or so now when it felt like the entire world was suddenly delcaring in unison that the Flying Burrito Brothers were the best group ever and that Gram Parsons himself was quite possibly God? That happened, right? People suddenly got 'into' Americana in a big way? Did that happen? Outside of the pages of Uncut and Mojo was this a thing? If so, who was responsible?
2) "Wild Horses" is the best Rolling Stones song that isn't "Miss You". And that's a fact!
Linda Ronstadt's here to pick you up off the floor after Gram and the boys have left you weeping into your compost bin with the peacocking strut of "You're No Good" - the sort of record that justifies the continuing existence of America, sounding as it does like a stroll down the Main Street of popular mythology. To these ears at least.
We head just south of the border for our pentultimate tune, El Chicano's loose-limbed and undeniably 'funky' (sometimes it's the only word that'll do, however utterly fucking jank it is) "Tell Her She's Lovely", which you'll be singing in the direction of your cabbage as you whip her out of the oven to admire the orange-splattered leaves in all their rich glory.
We end on a burst of pure, unbridled joy in the shape of Lesley Duncan's utterly ebulliant "I Can See Where I'm Going" a song I first heard in Norwegian selector Eden Rock's essential "An Autumn Mix" which the ever-reliable Test Pressing put out a few years ago. It's a song that simply fucking soars taking me far, far away from all this, whatever this is.
Cooking and music: the only things we can rely on in this life.
Salud!
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