the cook stack

I am continuing my way through the vegetables chapter of Cook This Book by Molly Baz. Here is recipe #11 for me – Charred Cabbage with Salty Peanuts and Nuoc Cham. This is a Vietnamese-inspired preparation in which cabbage is seared on the stove and roasted in the oven while a dressing is made to top the cabbage.

This dish was okay. We liked the flavors, could eat a little bit, and I chopped up leftovers for a stir fry the next night. However, we ended up having to toss some out still. This makes a lot of just-okay cabbage. I will not be revisiting this dish, but I do have two further notes below.

1. The photograph of this dish in Cook This Book makes it very hard to tell what the dish will end up looking like. Something about the filter and the color combination of the cabbage, plate, and background does not work well.
2. The Slanted Door cookbook by Charles Phan has a cabbage, chicken, and rice noodle salad with extremely similar flavors but comes together just a bit better, feels a bit more polished, and is substantial enough to eat as a whole meal. That is my keeper recipe when I am craving Vietnamese food.

That’s all of my cabbage talk for tonight – onto the next recipe!