Photo courtesy of thedailygreen.com

‘Tis the season to eat cabbage, a wonderful and woefully underused vegetable.  Cheap, too!  You get a whole lot of cabbage for your money; perhaps if your family is small it seems like you get way too much cabbage for your money.

We love homemade coleslaw and made a batch not long ago.  Shortly afterward some friends from Italy, came to visit us.  Their visit posed some interesting and difficult problems for Chef Captain; one of the women is a vegetarian, the other has an extremely restricted diet that excludes onions, garlic, tomato and soup.  In addition, the second woman is not very fond of fruit and likes only certain vegetables.  A knotty problem indeed.

On many of the evenings our guests were with us the only solution involved separate dishes, one with the offending ingredients (onions, garlic, principally), and one without.  Such was the case the day the Captain decided to take on the half a cabbage that was left over from our last coleslaw binge.

He fussed and muttered in front of the computer screen for quite a while, but in the end he came up with a recipe for Penne with Cabbage and Cream that is divine. While I credit him with its deliciousness, he insists it is but an adaptation of various recipes he found while researching food of the Alto Adige in Italy, a region that loves its cheese.  The dish is a great combination of the Virtuous (cabbage) and the Sublime (cream, cheese).  I hope you’ll try it… and don’t leave out the onions and garlic unless you absolutely have to.  You can find the recipe here.