Dinner Bowl #95

 

Here we have red cabbage braised in red wine, green rice, and lentils with butternut squash. The cabbage and rice were recipes from Deborah Madison's The Savory Way (1990), and the lentils and squash were from Thyme for Cooking, using my own homemade "chicken" stock.

I really need to get through some red wine. I've managed to use nearly all of my white wine, but the red wine has been only going in teeny bits here and there, so I needed to find some recipes that use more of it. There are a few recipes in The Savory Way that I'm planning to try, and this was the first. I did have to make a few substitutions--rosemary for juniper berries, and balsamic vinegar for red wine vinegar--but I think this is still representative of the recipe. I liked a lot of things about this, but I wasn't bowled over.

I felt the same way about the rice. I didn't have all the herbs on hand, though the original recipe says that you can just use spinach, parsley, and scallions, which is what I did. I think my main complaint about this rice is that it should probably cook in stock rather than in water. I think I would try this recipe again, but using veggie stock, and see if that changes my perceptions. I do appreciate that it's a really good way to incorporate a lot of greens!

My neighbor had given me a butternut squash from her garden, which I'd originally planned to roast. But although we did have cooler weather for a bit, oven weather seems to have disappeared for a little while, and so I am back to stovetop only fare for my midday meals. (Breakfast is reliably had in cool enough weather for the oven when the windows are open, fortunately!) This was a fairly straightforward recipe and really easy to put together, but also utterly delicious.

On the using-things-I-have front, the primary motive was to use red wine that needs using, but I also finished off a package of long grain rice and another package of French green lentils in this, as well as finally getting around to using an apple I adopted from a friend an embarrassingly long time ago. (The apple is in the cabbage.) I'm doing better with letting myself run out of ingredients, knowing I still have three kinds of rice on hand and two kinds of lentils, and therefore the apocalypse is unlikely to hit any time soon because I used these particular things.

Also, if useful to know: This is free of all major allergens. Eat up!