I’m not even kidding. I grilled cabbage. How drives a person do such a thing? Well, first, one reads a tempting post by Heidi Swanson over at 101 cookbooks about grilling fava beans and one thinks to oneself, “Heidi usually knows what she’s talking about and as nutty as it sounds to grill fava beans I bet they’re pretty good.”
Then, one attends a conference about sustainability at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spends two days sequestered in a room with people who think a lot about a) how the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, b) how to perhaps at least slow down if not stop the planet from going to hell in a hand-basket, or c) how to get people, at the very least, to eat more sardines and less imported farmed shrimp. As one learns that a 10 year-old has lived through the burning of a quarter of the carbon ever burned and a 22 year-old has seen one half of it used up, that breeding bluefin tuna will be gone from the Atlantic Ocean in about 3 years, and that 2020 is the new 2050 in terms of climate change and general horrific-ness* because things are moving faster than originally projected, one speaker makes an off-hand comment about pulling up a daikon radish from the field on his bio-dynamic farm and grilling it with a bit of olive oil. And, since one is, at this point, looking for something – anything – else to fixate on besides the fact that people might just be destined to keep using up resources like bacteria on a sugared petri dish, one wonders, “hmmmm, what does a grilled daikon radish taste like?”
So one asks the person next to them if they’ve ever grilled a daikon. The answer is no, but that person, it ends up, is also pretty intrigued by Heidi’s grilled fava beans.
And one goes home, and it’s hot in San Francisco, and using the stove or oven or any other heat-making device in the house seems like a bad idea, but, after three days of conference food and rich chefy offerings, cooking one’s own food seems like a good idea. So the grill gets fired up and the fact that a person can grill pretty much anything (i.e. fava beans, daikon radish) is right there, at the top of one’s mind fully and completely available for consideration. So one takes a cabbage, removes the outer leaves, cuts it into 8 wedges, puts them on skewers, brushes them with olive oil, sprinkles them with salt, and grills them until they have lovely charred edges, with some soft and tender leaves and some still somewhat crunchy salad-like leaves.
* Many thanks to Sam over at Chewswise for his post about the positive changes that are happening, the glimmers of hope that are shifts in consumer preferences that came out at the conference. Remembering that how we at and the food choices we make can all make a difference is part and parcel of how I sleep at night.
Ken Peterson | 19-May-09 at 8:50 pm | Permalink
I was tour guide for the Cooking for Solutions adventure down to Esalen Institute where Joyce Goldstein lightly grilled radicchio for the salad she demonstrated. Boy, was it yummy! Recipe’s in her Mediterranean salad cookbook.