I looked through my recipe files, and it seems I mostly eat cabbage in soups. I have fond memories of mom making boiled dinner with cabbage, carrots and potatoes as a kid, but now that I'm a vegetarian, without corned beef it is just boiled vegetables, lol! I tend to roast potatoes and carrots for flavor. I've heard you can do that with cabbage but have never tried. Mom also made a potato, cabbage kielbasa recipe that I loved, but again, without sausage it is not much other than a version of "bubble and squeak." So I tend to eat cabbage primarily in soup, coleslaw and stir fry. There are a gazillion recipes for coleslaw, I even saved our infamous coleslaw thread from here. It seems like Bobby Flay is the king of coleslaw on the Foodnetwork Web site, where I get a lot of my recipes. That man has quite the way with salads I must say, even though that is now what he is known for. So here's the recipe that is in my "to try" file right now. It came from someone here on CF, I believe from one of our "hearty winter soups" threads, but I copied it very early on in my CF days and did not put a credit on it. So if this is your recipe, step forward, lol! I'm going to use fake sausage because I'm vegetarian. I have used it before in recipes calling for sausage, it is pretty good. There are no instructions, so you have to know basic soup making techniques to use this recipe. Sausage Cabbage Soup 1 med. onion, chopped 1 TBLSP olive oil 1 TBLSP butter or margarine 2 med. carrots, halved and thinly sliced 1 celery rib, thinly sliced 1/2 tsp. ground caraway seeds (or whole ones I guess, I happen to have ground caraway on hand, thank you Penzey's!) 2 cups chicken or vegetable broth 2 cups chopped cabbage 1/2 lb. fully cooked smoked kielbasa or polish sausage, halved and cut into 1/4 inch slices (I'll be using Morningstar Farms fake sausage links) 1 14.5 oz. can of diced tomatoes, undrained 1 TBLSP brown sugar 1 can white kidney beans, rinsed and drained (I'll probably use great northern) 1 tsp. vinegar 1 tsp. salt 1/4 tsp. pepper Minced fresh parsley for a garnish. I adore cabbage rolls, but with three jobs and commuting it just aint ever gonna happen in my kitchen. Here's one more cabbage recipe for now. I got this from a REdbook magazine issue, April 1999. It was from an article on how to get your kids to eat vegetables. The recipes came from the Moosewood restaurant. Potato Cabbage TRaingles 1 cup peeled and sliced Idaho potatoes (or local PA potatoes, lol!) 3 cups finely chopped green cabbage 1/2 onion, finely chopped 1 TBLSP butter 1 cup lowfat cottage cheese 1 cup grated cheddar cheese 2 eggs 1/4 cup chopped flat leaf parsley 1 TBLSP fresh dill (I dunno, maybe 1 tsp. dried dill, I never have fresh on hand except in the summer, so that's my guess.) 1/2 tsp. salt 1/4 tsp. pepper 2 refrigerator piecrusts from a 15 oz. package (you can make your own piecrust but as you know I'm dough-challenged, so the store-bought kind is fine for me.) Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Boil potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain and roughly mash. Saute onion and cabbage in oil and butter in a skillet over med. hi heat until tender, about 15 min. Add to potatoes and stir in cottage cheese, cheddar, one egg, parsley, dill and salt and pepper. Cut each pie crust into 4 traingle shaped wedges. Divide the filling and spoon it into the center of each wedge. Lightly beat the remaining egg with 1 TBLSP water. With a pastry brush, coat edges of the pastry with the egg mixture and fold over to form a triangle. Press edges with a fork to seal. Arrage pastries on a greased baking sheet. Brush each pastry with the egg/water mixture and spinkle with sesame and/or poppy seeds. Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown. Makes 8 pastries. Note: these are not low fat, so if you are a hardcore health nut or vegetarian you can sub all or half tofu for the cottage cheese, and use less cheddar, say 2/3 cup. These are very good to make ahead and reheat for lunch at work or a snack. You can also add other vegetables like shredded carrots or zuchinni.

Everyone's big gardens sound so wonderful...Here is what I have... pretty pitiful in comparison..but it's all I can do this year, I am the one that had a hysterectomy, bladder and bowel lift 7 weeks ago....anyway. I have a big flower bed in one corner of our back yard that had a huge Bridal Wreath Spirea, that my husband hated except when it was blooming, he thought it was ugly the rest of the time. So before my surgery I cut it back to the ground and put Round Up on it. I intend to dig out the root system next year and make this bed match the opposite bed in the back yard with a tree type Crepe Myrtle and Yopon Hollies...So in the mean time I bought 5-5 gallon Lowe's buckets and had my 11 year old granddaughter help me plant tomatoes in them. I did manage to get some help hauling home the big bags of Miracle Grow Potting soil to fill them with. I do not have much "manly" help at this house with things like that.... anyway.. the granddaughter did a bang up job of planting the tomatoes and had a lot of fun doing it, got her bare feet muddy etc and loved it. I even had her use the cordless drill for the drain holes. I left them on my deck for about a month then had my son come over and set them in that flower bed that's just sitting there empty now... I had him line the buckets up against the privacy fence and it doesn't look to awful bad either, the buckets are a bright blue so they are pretty. Those tomatoes must love it, they are growing like crazy, blooming and I even have nickel size tomatoes on them! The granddaughter is beyond excited about this and can't wait for some fried green tomatoes she said (I love this kid)... Now I am worried, I got to reading on the internet and some people say that tomatoes planted in containers produce great and other say theirs didn't produce at all. So I was wondering if anyone here has great or bad luck with container tomatoes?... and I am worried that I won't have enough to satisfy my summer long love of tomatoes and freshly made salsa, since I read the smaller bush type which is what I bought since they are recommended for containers, that they do not produce as much fruit. I think I planted 2 of the bush tomatoes, one Celebrity and 2 heck can't remember what they are....seriously I can't.... so now I am thinking about getting 2 regular plants that get bigger and stick them in the ground in between 3 of the buckets. Since that is a pretty big bed I got 2 cucumbers and planted them in between 2 of the buckets so they will have room to spread out. The reason I did not plant all of them in the ground in that bed is it needed too much work, moving mulch, killing out grass etc... just stuff I could not do this summer.. so, how do your container tomatoes do?....

I am very pleased with the different varieties! I got my package yesterday and went through it last night. I'm excited to grow some of the new to me varieties. Thanks for getting all this work done despite surgery, etc. I'm sorry you had so much on your plate, Belinda. You hosted a wonderful swap!

Sorry, I haven't checked back here for awhile and just saw the latest messages. I haven't done much big cooking for awhile, do to current life demands, and still haven't had a chance to try the new dicing sets. I probably should, just to say I did, but for a single vegetable, I just grab a knife. I really like the dicing (original set) when I'm cooking for the crowd. I wish it worked better with raw hard roots, but I understand why there are issues. I hypothesize that the fresher and damper the roots are, the better they'll dice. Still, there are peppers and onions and squash and all kinds of softer things I chop regularly. I should make some gazpacho and play. :) OTOH, I have a highly rated manual hinged lid dicer which I can't even get an onion through, so whatever help I get, is good help. What the W-S staff were doing wrong is focusing on french fries. Most of the people I know offline don't make french fries at home. They're a drive thru thing. :) The peeler was designed for potatoes, though I've used it on apples and other things. It looks like it's taking a lot of good product, but it's really not more than most veg peelers do. The result gets beat up, though, so not for pretty work. The peeler, however, is best on smaller potatoes. I just cut mine and don't worry about loosing a little more on the cut edges. If peeling potatoes is a big enough task to even think of going to the machine (like for latkes for the multitudes), it's good. But then if you take what you've peeled and put it through the dicer, you aren't going to get much in the way of lovely long fries. I haven't tried, since I don't make french fries, but I'm guessing the demo didn't use the narrow feed tude, either, and if you're doing something vertical, you need to, or it'll fall over and give you the wrong shape. But I wasn't there and can't be sure of what they did or what you saw, Loves. I'll put it on my list of things to try just for trying. I can always cube them up after. While I do love the chopping element, the FP as a whole is just amazingly beautifully designed, and I still adore it. I never much liked my Cuisinart. It was a bother to use. The other day I was making ... fangipane, I think ... the directions called for the food processor, which is common with almond flour so you don't have to sift it. I wasn't thinking and just put my ingredients in the main bowl, rather than the small one. I was worried because it was a thin layer on the bottom of the bowl. It worked fine! I was amazed. This thing is so easy to use and clean! LOVE still blooms!