Winter warmer

It's very lovely outside, but very cold with it. You need a nourishing, central-heating sort of meal on days like this. This cabbage soup is popular in our house and it's easy (and cheap!) to make.

I feel that cabbage soup has a bit of an image problem. There's the cabbage soup diet, for one thing, which I've never really looked at (until right then) but which somehow seems very depressing and January-ish. Then there's the nothing-but-cabbage soup diet of the Bucket family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I've mentioned before (in the context of the 2009 cabbage glut). Cabbage soup just sounds boring and desperate.

I don't have a cabbage glut this year - it was a bad year generally for the cabbage family in our garden - so this cabbage was one I had to pay for. It's huge though, and this recipe only used a quarter of it. Cabbage is cheap to buy and lasts a long time in the fridge, which makes it a useful vegetable to have around.

The soup is very simple: onions, garlic, carrots, cabbage, lentils (for a bit of protein), some good stock (I used ham stock) and tomato sauce (in this case it was some of the sauce I froze down in the summer, but a can of crushed tomatoes would work just as well). You just fry the diced onion, garlic and carrots in butter or oil, then stir in the shredded cabbage, add the stock, lentils and tomatoes and then simmer for 30 minutes until the cabbage is tender. Let it sit off the heat for 10-15 minutes to get to a comfortable temperature for eating.

I was making bread anyway this morning, so I used some of the dough to make rolls to eat with the soup.