Today I slaughtered one of the biggest cabbages in our garden. I’m growing ten white cabbages this year and most of them are ready to harvest now. I prefer to wait for autumn or winter to harvest them though as I prefer to make sarma with them. And that’s a real winter meal. But today I decided to harvest a few of them early in the year as the slugs have found them and have started munching on them. Also we don’t know if we will be still living here in the new year, so maybe it’s not a very good idea to wait for winter.

Enough reasons to cut some cabbage heads and start cooking some poor man’s food. Today nr. 1 was on the menu and it weighed 1.3kg (all cleaned). You could feed an orphanage with so much cabbage. I decided to make three dishes with one cabbage. A white cabbage curry, a raw cabbage salad and a white cabbage quiche. It was a great cooking combination, as I could cook the cabbage all together for both warm dishes. This saved me time and I now have some ready (frozen) meals for later on.

Today I’m sharing the super easy recipe of the white cabbage quiche with you.

Ingredients:
– puff pastry (ready to use package)
– 450gr white cabbage
– 2 big onions
– salt & pepper
– oil (as neutral as possible)

To-do-list:
The to do list as as simple as the ingredients list. First you defrost the puff pastry. Heat up the oven at 180C. Simultaneously you cut the cabbage in smaller chunks (doesn’t have to be really small). You do the same with the onions. In a stir fry pan you heat up some oil and add the onions first. When they get a bit brownish and slightly caramelised, you slowly add all the cabbage in the pan. Keep on stirring till the cabbage shrinks significantly and also gets this brownish caramelised shine. That would probably take about 5-10 minutes. Now add some pepper and salt to taste. Roll out the puff pastry in a quiche form and top it off with the (strained) cabbage/onion mix. Place it now in the pre-heated oven for 30 minutes on 180C. Serve it with a fresh salad and a dollop of farmer’s cheese if you like the taste.

For me this dish reminds me very much of the pita my grandmother used to make with cabbage. It was one of the many zelniks she would make. Zelnik is a pastry dish filled with some kind of green vegetable in it. My version is definitely a more contemporary and more easy to make version with similar ingredients.

I prefer my cabbage tart as simple as possible. That’s how we ate it in my memory. The Balkan kitchen (I’m not including the Greek kitchen) doesn’t use a big variety of herbs and spices to spice up dishes. Most things are eaten as is. If you find the dish to neutral taste wise, you could also add some cumin seeds on top of the dish, before placing it in the oven. This will definitely give it more flavour.