Ed. note: See more of Joanna’s cooking — and gorgeous food photography — on her blog, Jojo’s Kitchen.

Sometimes putting together a meal from whatever scraps you have left in the cupboard and fridge yields ho-hum results.  Other times, magic happens. I’ll be so bold as to say that this dish falls into the latter category. Why, you ask? Just let me tell you a little story about the time I made these noodles.

Picture it: I was rummaging through my kitchen, trying to figure out what to make for dinner for myself and my boyfriend, who was already on his way over to my place. I had soba noodles. I had edamame. I had fresh ginger, garlic, and all kinds of condiments. I just needed ideas.  As often happens, I consulted epicurious.com and found this gem of a recipe from the August 2007 issue of Gourmet magazine (oh, Gourmet, may you rest in peace).  After a quick trip to the produce store down the street (which, I smile to point out, is called U Don’t Know Nothing Produce), I was in possession of some lovely shiitake mushrooms, some Napa cabbage, and scallions. Perfect. Before I knew it, I was chopping and sautéing them with the aroma of garlic and ginger filling my apartment.

So, how good was it? Maybe too good.  After preparing the sauce, veggies, and noodles, the whole dish came together as a delightful symphony of flavors and aromas that prompted us to start eating straight out of the pot. After dealing out heaping portions into a couple of bowls, I was pouring myself a glass of wine when I heard a small thud and an exclamation of, “Oh NO!”

I turned around to find my boyfriend contemplating a pile of shiitake mushrooms, noodles, and cabbage on the floor. “It’s okay,” I said. “There’s plenty more.”  He looked thoughtful for a moment, as if considering whether or not he was willing to sacrifice an entire bowlful. “Nah,” he said, “I think it’s okay. Besides, I’ll probably want more after this.” He scooped the noodles back into his bowl and, aside from a small bit on the bottom of the pile that had made the most direct contact with my living room carpet, ate an entire bowl of noodles that had fallen on the floor—all because they seemed too delicious and too precious to waste. And he went back for seconds.

This is a pretty easy recipe, though it does involve a whole lot of chopping. It’s the perfect kind of dish to make when friends/significant others drop by for dinner:  the work is pretty mindless, so it’s easy to enjoy a conversation and perhaps also a glass of wine while getting dinner ready. It’s also pretty versatile: it’s great hot or cold, and it works well with a variety of different ingredients. The original recipe is vegetarian- and vegan-friendly; I, however, have made this recipe both with and without shrimp. I’m sure it would be great with some seared tofu, too—just play around and see what you like.  I also swapped out the 1/3 cup of water that the original recipe calls for and replaced it with rice vinegar and sesame oil to round out the flavors—flavors so round that you may, um, find yourself eating it off the floor, too.

Spicy Soba Noodles with Shiitakes, Cabbage, and Edamame

Adapted from Gourmet

Serves 4

Ingredients

For the sauce:

¼ cup rice vinegar

A few tablespoons of sesame oil, to taste

1/3 cup soy sauce

2 or 3 teaspoons of Korean hot-pepper paste, depending on how hot you want it (Sriracha is also great here if you don’t have or can’t find the hot-pepper paste)

1 tablespoon packed brown sugar

For the Noodles:

3 tablespoons sesame seeds

¼ cup vegetable oil

2 tablespoons of finely chopped peeled ginger

1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic

10 oz fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and thinly sliced*

1 head of Napa cabbage (1-1 ¼ pounds), thinly sliced (should yield about 8 cups—I know, that’s a lot).

6 scallions, thinly sliced

1 box soba noodles (8 or 9 oz). If you don’t have soba, I imagine you can also use a very thin long-cut pasta, but the buckwheat flavor of the soba noodles is especially nice.

1 cup frozen shelled edamame

A couple of handfuls of shrimp, peeled and deveined (optional)

*A quick note on the shiitakes: clean them using a clean, damp towel or a damp paper towel. Never, ever clean mushrooms by rinsing them!  It makes them rubbery, and it also interferes with the browning process.

First, stir together all of the sauce ingredients in a sauce pot over medium-low heat until the brown sugar is dissolved.  Set it aside. That was easy, no?

Toast the sesame seeds by stirring them in a dry skillet over medium heat until they are golden brown. Set them aside in a small bowl so you can use the same skillet for your veggies.

Heat the vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. You’ll know it’s ready when the oil looks like it’s shimmering. (Vegetable oil is preferable here because its flavor, unlike that of olive oil, won’t compete with the other flavors of the dish.) Add the ginger and garlic and sauté for about 30 seconds until fragrant. Make sure that the garlic doesn’t burn.  Then add the shiitakes and sauté until they start to brown and get nice and tender. Then reduce the heat to medium and add the cabbage and most of the scallions, saving a little bit for garnishing the dish at the end. Cook until the cabbage is tender but still has some crunch to it, about 5 or 6 minutes. Then add the sauce and simmer it for another couple of minutes.

While the cabbage and mushroom mixture cooks, cook the soba and edamame together in a big pot of boiling, salted water until the noodles are just tender. (If you’re using shrimp, you can also throw them into the pot to quickly cook them, or you can sear or grill them and throw them on at the end. Up to you.)  Drain the pasta and edamame in a colander and then rinse them under cool water to stop the cooking.  Drain them again, and then transfer to a large bowl or back into your pasta pot. Add in the sesame seeds and cabbage mixture and toss it all together. Serve the noodles in bowls topped with the reserved scallions and enjoy.

Bubble, bubble...minus toil and trouble

Let’s first make one thing clear: I’m a big fan of the vinegar pickle.  I love the dilly bean and the pickled corn round and swear I would walk 500 miles (more, even) because I am a junkie for those grossly addictive Zuni café red onion pickles (yes, those pickles.  The good news is there’s no need to walk anywhere. Visit those links! They are a piece of cake to create at home).  Not to mention the many occasions when pickles, snacked on between shots of vodka, have no doubt inoculated against unkind mornings-after.  Mainly, it seems I can’t ever get enough vinegar.  One, let’s say, “uncommon” habit I have is to down cider vinegar mixed with molasses on occasions I’m too lazy to brew coffee, or when I’m in need of a pre-jog pick-me-up.  Probably, it goes without my saying: Any vegetable in vinegar is basically this girl’s dream come true.

Here’s the but: If there’s anything I love more than the vinegar pickle, it’s the lacto-fermented pickle.  Science projects that double as cooking have—for the past couple years—placed high among my preferred pursuits.  These include, but are by no means limited to, sourdough bread baking, kombucha brewing, and yogurt culturing.  Among these, there is nothing quite like watching cabbage bubble up in its crock into sauerkraut and kimchi—and my latest experiment, a Japanese cabbage pickle called “tsukemono.”  There’s something wondrous about lacto-fermentation.  Given a couple days, the bacteria already present on raw cabbage turns some tricks, ups the vitamin C and lactobactilli content, and emerges something greater than the sum of its parts. You shred some cabbage, add salt, and basically that’s it: it practically wants to become sauerkraut for you. It’s like Jimmy Stewart put it, once upon The Philadelphia Story: “Vinegar pickles are a slap on the back. And lacto-fermentation is a heavy mist before my eyes.”  So maybe he was talking about whiskey and champagne, respectively, but lacto-fermentation isn’t so different from bubbly: It’s magical, it’s fortifying, and it will make you giddy.

For reasons beyond understanding, store-bought sauerkraut often contains high fructose corn syrup or other dumb additives.  On top of all this, it costs a small fortune.  Why pay for the jar or refrigerated (often pasteurized! What!) bag when it’s simple—and it really is truly, truly simple—to make your own for pennies?  It’s delicious, for one thing, and ridiculously good for you: it’s rife with vitamins, highly digestible, promotes healthy intestinal flora, boosts your immune system, and can heal your broken heart.

Ways to enjoy your pickled cabbage

• There’s no shame in eating kraut straight out of the jar, but my favorite thing is a sandwich of toasted dark bread—some kind of pumpernickel or dark rye—slathered nearly to excess with mustard, topped with kimchi or sauerkraut and sardines. It is possible to buy the fish in its “skinless and boneless” manifestation, but why do that, when you’d be paying more to miss out on tasty calcium?  What I do is I remove the primary, disorienting, crunchy spine; the rest ain’t no thang.
• Sauerkraut pushed around in a pan with juniper berries and sausage
• Kimchi fried rice: If your kimchi grows “overripe”—meaning too sour for you to bear, what you do is fry it up with some day (or longer)-old rice, throw in frozen peas, cilantro, cumin, soy sauce, eggs, and white pepper.
• Make triangles of toast, top with tsukemono, a raw (if possible) or smoked oyster (recommended: Crown Prince smoked oysters in Olive Oil; steer clear of cottonseed, because it is gross) and as many drops of Tabasco on top as you can stand.
• Drink the kraut juice.  Just do it!  It’s good and good for you.

Japanese sauerkraut a.k.a. Tsukemono

Adapted from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
Makes 1 quart

1 head Napa cabbage, cored and shredded
1 bunch green onions, chopped
2 tablespoons naturally fermented soy sauce
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons whey (if not available, use an additional 1 teaspoon salt)

This is traditionally made with a culture derived from rice bran, but whey serves an identical purpose and is more easily obtained. (You can simply drain it off the top of your yogurt; or if you make your own cheese, you know what to do.) Place all ingredients in a bowl, mix well and pound with a wooden pounder or a meat hammer to release juices.  Place in a quart-sized, wide-mouth mason jar and press down firmly with a pounder or meat hammer until juices come to the top of the cabbage.  The top of the vegetables should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar.  Cover tightly and keep at room temperature for about 3 days before transferring to cold storage.

Interested in sauerkraut or kimchi? My favorite kimchi instructions come from Greg Cooks: his kimchi tutorial is excellent and simple, and the results ultra tasty.  My sauerkraut advice I get, of course, from Sandorkraut.  Check out his Wild Fermentation forums if you’re afraid of poisoning yourself, but really, you shouldn’t be.

Coleslaw is one of those dishes that evaded my understanding for a long time. A pile of shredded cabbage drenched (sopping, in fact) in mayonnaise, flavorless, textureless, and mushy? Mm, sign me up. No wait, keep that as far away from me as possible. No, I don’t want it on the side of my sandwich, or my fried chicken, or anywhere in my immediate or not-so-immediate vicinity.

I’ve increasingly been suspecting, though, that not all coleslaws are created equal, and that coleslaw can, in fact, be not only palatable, but delicious — crispy, refreshing, bursting with flavor. I’ve been seeing it on a lot of sandwiches lately, in its not so mayonnaisy, greasy form. And so, recently, I have decided to give coleslaw a second chance. And it has been revelatory.

Coleslaw is awesome! Or at least, this coleslaw is awesome. It combines 2 different cabbages (red and green) with carrots and corn kernels, for lots of different colors and textures and tastes. And, equally importantly, its dressing doesn’t taste like you just dumped a jar of mayo on all your hard-shredded veggies and called it a day. Yes, there is mayo in the dressing. But there is also lime juice and vinegar and hot sauce and all kinds of other strange alchemy that produces a sweet-sour-spicy sauce in just enough quantity to cover, but not drench, the cabbage, etc.

The night I made this, I served it with a chipotle-rubbed steak and grilled avocados (more on that later). The next day, it was recycled as a topping in scrumptious pork tacos — soft tortilla, leftover pork tenderloin chunks, salsa, and — since we were lacking hot sauce — sriracha (which I think may be even better than Cholula in taco-land).

This will keep for a few days; things will get a bit soggy, but because the dressing is so much lighter than commercial coleslaw, it will still taste fine.

Awesome, Semi-Spicy Coleslaw

Adapted from License to Grill, by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby

Makes a good-sized bowl of coleslaw (for 4-6 people), but you may want to double the recipe depending on how large the heads of cabbage you had to buy are, and how adept you are with other cabbage uses.

Ingredients

- ½ cup mayonnaise (I used jarred to fine effect, but you can also use homemade)

- 1/3 cup olive oil

- 1/3 cup fresh lime juice (from about 2 large limes)

- ¼ cup distilled white vinegar (recipe called for red wine vinegar, but we only had white, you can use either)

- 2 tbsp. Sugar

- 2 tbsp. Ketchup

- 10 or so dashes hot sauce, preferably Cholula or Tapatio

- salt and freshly ground black pepper

- 2 cups shredded green cabbage

- 1 cup shredded red cabbage

- 1 cup shredded carrots (1-2 carrots)

- 2 ears of corn, husked

1. Prep the veggies:

- Here’s a how-to on shredding cabbage.

- To “shred” carrots, I just grated them, which I thought was easiest.

- After you’ve husked the corn, either steam or boil it briefly (about 2 minutes) just so it softens up a bit. Remove from heat and cut kernels away (I find a bread knife is easiest for this).

2. Make the dressing:

- Combine first seven ingredients (mayo through hot sauce) in a small bowl. Whisk to blend. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste (it should be a little spicy, but not overwhelming, with touches of sweetness and acidity).

3. Combine everything in a big bowl! Enjoy coleslaw, possibly for the first time ever.

Thanks to The Amateur Gourmet’s post a couple of weeks back, I had really been craving pork chops and cabbage. So I made them. This is a pretty wintry dish, as it’s quite hearty and gut-warming, but good cabbage is available year-round, so the seasonal eater in you does not need to worry about this one.

Pork chops are a terrific cut of meat for the burgeoning cook, because, as far as meat goes they’re quite cheap. They’re also pretty forgiving, and so long as you avoid cooking them to death, they’ll be tender. I do recommend a high moisture cooking method like this one for chops, though, as they can tend to get a little dry.

This is a one-pot dish that takes less than an hour from start to finish, and there’s something about those caramelized bone-in chops that really makes you look like a professional. Simple, tasty, and impressive. Try this dish, and add it to your arsenal. you won’t regret it.

1. Chop up the cabbage and set it aside. I used one head with these two chops, which looks like a HUGE amount of cabbage, but it cooks down more than you would think.

2. In a deep-ish pot heat a few tablespoons of olive oil over medium-high heat. Carefully add the pork chops, avoiding second-degree oil burns. Brown the pork chops, roughly 90 seconds or so on each side. Just eyeball it and take them out when they look good.

3. Admire pork chops:

4. Add the cabbage to the pot with the oil and pork fat. Mix until all the cabbage looks shiny and starts to wilt a little bit, then add half a cup of wine, about a quarter cup of red wine vinegar, a few tablespoons of whole grain dijon mustard, salt, and pepper. once this is all bubbling along, lower the heat to medium, lay the chops on top of the cabbage, and partially cover the pot. Now you are BRAISING, which is just a fancy work for simmering in a little bit of liquid.

5. Let this go for about 25 minutes, then check the pork chops for doneness. Contrary to popular belief, you do NOT have to cook pork chops until they are grey and leathery. I am sure I am going to get hate mail from the health police on this one, but it is perfectly ok to eat porkchops that are still just a tiny bit pink. I don’t mean pork sashimi here; your chops should be white throughout, but a well-cooked porkchop has just a hint of pink in it’s color. If you’ve ever ordered a pork chop at a good restaurant, you’ve seen what I mean. Err a little on the side of doneness, but don’t panic if your meat is not dark grey throughout.

I also served these with some roasted green beans and the rest of the white wine used in cooking. It was awesome.