Pantry of ideas satisfies yen for cooked cabbage

Among the many vegetables marching into the kitchen these days are cabbages, red and green. We have been regaling ourselves on corn and cucumbers, chard, spinach, and summer squash, and with cool drizzly weather early this week, I was thinking about cooked cabbage. Because I keep all the interesting recipes you send me, even if I don’t use them right away, they form a kind of pantry of ideas that I can peruse. This week I went looking for cabbage ideas.

Last winter we were talking about different things to do with cabbage, and sure enough I found a recipe for Cedric’s Casserole that Martha Wolford in Lincoln had sent me. I dusted off Martha’s recipe and gave it a try. It was just the ticket for a huge cabbage that had split in the heat last weekend and that I wanted to use up soon because it took up a lot of room in the fridge and wasn’t paying any rent.

You don’t see many packaged mixes in this column or canned sauces or the like. For one thing, I am too much of a cheapskate to pay someone else to mix together a couple of ingredients then expect me to take out the trash for them. And the other thing is that I want to see what goes into something. It’s no big whoop to blend together butter, flour and milk to come up with a cream sauce to which I can add my own chopped celery or mushrooms, or grated cheese. And then, look, ma, no tin can to take to the transfer facility. The exception is tomato soup.

We almost always have canned tomato soup around because we like it with grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and when I have tomatoes from the garden, which isn’t very often, I save them for making my own spaghetti sauce. Canned soup can be a handy sauce in a hurry, and in this cabbage casserole it is very tasty.

Historically, cabbage is often cooked with sausage, and in this casserole, you might want to substitute bulk sausage of one sort or another, perhaps Italian or plain country, for the ground beef. Or maybe you have ground pork, or venison on hand.

Sprinkle some grated cheese on this casserole before baking it. Also, I shook some oregano on the layer of meat before adding the second batch of cabbage.

Looking for zucchini relish

My friend Annmarie Mouw was telling me about the zucchini relish she made a couple of days ago. She has an old family recipe that she has used for years, but she said, “I wonder what other people do to make it. It would be interesting to see other recipes.” I agree. If you have a pet relish to make out of zucchini, and feel like sharing, send it along.

Cedric?s Casserole

Serves 6.

1 medium to large onion, chopped

3 tablespoons butter or

vegetable oil

? pound ground beef

? teaspoon salt

Pepper to taste

6 cups coarsely shredded

cabbage

1 10?-ounce can tomato soup

Grated cheese (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Saute the chopped onion in the butter, and then add the ground beef, heating it through, but not browning it, and seasoning it with salt and pepper. Spread half of the cabbage in a two-quart casserole, top with the meat and onion mixture, spread over that the rest of the cabbage, and lastly, the soup on the top. Bake covered for an hour.

Write to Sandy Oliver, 1061 Main Road, Islesboro 04848. E-mail: tastebuds@prexar.com. For recipes, tell us where they came from. List ingredients, specify number of servings and do not abbreviate measurements. Include name, address and daytime phone number.