We eat a lot of vegetables in my house but my spouse a kinda of fussy about what he likes and doesn’t like. Add to this the fact that I get sick of eating the same things repeatedly and it makes trying to find 6 different vegetables to cook each week a little challenging. So I’m always looking for new ways to prepare veggies. When I was in Frankfurt for work in December, a German colleague took me out to a nice local restaurant that served a very tasty red cabbage dish. After eating it I decide that making red cabbage in a similar fashion might be a good possible dinner vegetable. The problem was I had no clue what the thing was called. All I had to go on was my eating experience. I knew that it wasn’t sauerkraut because it just wasn’t sour enough but the cabbage was a decidedly similar texture and had a bit of a “bite” to the taste. So this got me looking around on the Internet a bit with search terms like – German red cabbage warm. Eventually I discovered that a pretty common recipe was braised red cabbage. So I started looking at these recipes to try to figure out which might most closely match the dish I’d had. Most braised red cabbage recipes use red cabbage and a tart apple, but I didn’t think what the dish I’d encountered featured apple, so I kept looking.
Eventually I found a recipe that included cabbage, garlic, shallots, pancetta, balsamic vinegar and red wine. Even though from looking at the ingredients it was pretty clear this wasn’t a German dish (more likely Italian), I was intrigued by the recipe and decided to make it. It turned out pretty tasty but unfortunately the red wine seems to make the sugar content too high for my spouse. So I’m back to the drawing board to find a recipe sans wine.