Wirsing-Pie (Savoy Pie)

It's that time of year again when the German supermarkets fill up with super cheap cabbage. I've been here for almost 5 years and have never tried any. But at 69 cents a head I just could not resist buying an ultra fresh looking head of Wirsing (turns out it's English name is Savoy).

The big questions were: What do you do with Savoy? How do you cook it? Does it taste good?

A Google search led me to this web site:
http://www.essen-und-trinken.de/wirsing/vegetarische-rezepte-mit-wirsing-1018534.html

I decided to try out their "Wirsing-Pie", of course I modified it a bit because I didn't have the exact ingredients.
Did it turn out well, you ask? Two of us liked it, one said it was "okay" and the other was so stuffed from the snacks she had had at the musical project she is attending that she didn't get passed the salad! I rather think that the cabbage scared my kids!!

Serves 4 - 6 (as always depending on the level of hunger). If I remember correctly it took me about an hour from start to finish.

Ingredients:

500 g	Savoy cabbage
100 g	Onions, diced
2 cloves	Garlic, minced
20 g	Sliced almonds
2 + 1 tbsp.	Butter (or margarine)
2 tsp.	Flour
	Salt and Pepper
200 ml	Water
200 ml	Whipping cream (or soy substitute)
1/2	Vegetable cube
2 tbsp.	Lemon juice
	Zest from one lemon
1/4 tsp.	Sugar
2 packs	Instant mash potato mix (plus all the ingredients that the packet calls for)
100 g	Gouda (or not if you are vegan or lactose intolerant)

Method:

500 g of savoy turns out to be about half of a German head.

The 500 grams needs to be halved and the hard stem part removed. Then half it once more and cut into strips about 1 cm wide and then wash the cabbage.

Put 2 tablespoons of butter into a large pan [make sure it is large enough to hold all of the chopped cabbage] on medium heat and after it melts add in the sliced almonds and fry them until they are golden brown. Once they are browned remove them from the pan but leave the butter in the pan. As you can see I kind of almost burnt my butter and maybe my almonds were too brown. (I was cutting the onions and garlic and forgot about the almonds!) However, since they were not "burnt" I let them be and they gave a nice colour to the finished product.

Toasted Almonds

Then put the onions and the garlic into the hot butter and fry them for a minute or so. Be careful not to let the butter burn (ha, ha!).

Then add in your savoy and mix it in. Sprinkle the flour on top of the savoy, and I mean "sprinkle". If you just throw it in then you will have lumps of flour in your pie.

Mix it all up so that the flour is well incorporated and add salt and pepper to taste.

Next add the 200 ml water and the vegetable cube. I use a rather large vegetable cube. If I were to use a Sri Lankan Maggie cube then I would use a whole cube in this recipe. Alternatively you can use 200 ml vegetable stock. If you've been reading my blog you will know that I can't be bothered making/buying vegetable stock!

Then add the cream, lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar and toasted almonds and mix it all up. By this time the savoy is probably cooked. Mine was but that was probably because I spent a lot of time just finding the ingredients. I was a bad cook and didn't prepare anything in advance. I was under time pressure.

Once the savoy is just about cooked place it in an oven proof casserole dish. Put the fan oven on at 180 C.

Then prepare the mash potato. I was running out of time and used two packs of instant mash. Each pack supposedly serving 3 people. It is a bit too much but I didn't have a choice. 1 pack was too not enough. The instant mash should be prepared according to the instructions on the package. Then I chopped up my Gouda and mixed it into the mash. This mash then went on top of the cabbage, the last bit of butter was dabbed on top of the pie and the whole thing was popped in the oven  (which was preheated to 180 degrees Celsius, fan oven) for 25 minutes. For a conventional oven use 200 C or 400 F.

And lo and behold it was done just before I had to pick up the girls from their above mentioned musical project. Cabbage never tasted so good!