Love to try interesting-sounding new recipes? Me, too! Get a recipe failure now and then? Me, too!
All may not be lost.
I enjoy experimenting with new recipes. Sometimes, a recipe just doesn’t appeal to my taste or it lacks the visual appeal that is so important to me in food. Occasionally, I have a real failure.
The other day it was the latter. A. Real. Failure.
I had bought a beautiful cabbage at my local farmers market. I tried a recipe that featured a whole roasted cabbage. The recipe just didn’t work for me and there I was with a whole roasted cabbage on my hands. What to do?
Serendipitously, writers on a site I read regularly on Facebook (Cookbooks of Interest) were posting about a recipe from Josh McFadden’s much-acclaimed cookbook, Six Seasons. That recipe they said was perfect—easy, delicious, healthy. One poster wrote: “My husband told me that I can make this soup any time. So much flavor from such simple ingredients.” Wrote another, “This was absolutely delicious on this cool cloudy day. I couldn’t keep my spoon out of it. The sweet and melty cabbage– oh my.”
So, I decided to “repurpose” my abundance of roasted cabbage. Cabbage Soup With Onion and Farro it would be!
“Oh My!,” indeed.
The soup is delicious.
You may be curious about the farro featured in this recipe if you haven’t cooked with it before. Farro is a nutty-flavored form of wheat grain. According to Harold McGee’s seminal book on all things food-related (On Food and Cooking) farro (or emmer wheat) was probably the second type of wheat to be cultivated after einkorn wheat. It could be grown in warmer climates than einkorn wheat and became the most cultivated form of wheat in the area from the Near East to Northern Africa until Roman times when it was superseded by durum and bread wheat.
Six Seasons is available through your local bookstore or can be purchased on Amazon here. By the way, I’m also finding Thrift Books to be a great source of new and used books. Here is the link: Thrift Books.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
Cabbage Soup With Onion and Farro
Ingredients
- 1 pound roasted cabbage (sliced thin)
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 large onion (sliced thin)
- Kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper
- 3 large garlic cloves (peeled and smashed)
- 1 large sprig of thyme
- 1 T. red wine vinegar
- 2/3 C. farro
- 5-6 C. vegetable broth
- 1 T. fresh lemon juice
- Freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
- Sprig of thyme for garnish
Directions
- Step 1 Cut cabbage head in quarters, generously rub the quarters with olive oil and roast them on a baking sheet in your oven until it is soft and the edges of the cabbage begin to color. This will take about 30 minutes at 450 degrees F. Remove the cabbage from the oven, let it cool and slice it.
- Step 2 Saute onion(with a pinch of salt) in about 1/4 C. olive oil in a large pot for about 10 minutes. You want the onion to soften and become translucent. Add the garlic and continue to cook until it becomes soft.
- Step 3 Add the sliced cabbage and the thyme to the pot with the onion, stir and cook briefly. Stir in the vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- Step 4 Heat more olive oil in a separate pot. Add the farro and let it toast in the oil for about 5 minutes. Stir the farro constantly to keep it from burning. When the farro is toasted, add it to the cabbage and onion mixture. Add the broth and simmer the soup for about 30 minutes.
- Step 5 Stir in lemon juice. This soup is VERY thick. Add more broth until you have a consistency you like. (This is necessary upon reheating, too.)
- Step 6 Serve soup garnished generously with grated Parmesan and decorated with a sprig of thyme.
