Lindsay's Irish Cabbage

My dinner tonight is fantastic! I'm giving the blog spotlight to the cabbage.

Now, I'm Irish-American, and my research into the subject of traditional Irish cabbage preparations was half-assed. But WHATEVER it is that I'm eating, that I just made, is great.




Here's what I did:

Preheat the oven to 350 f.

Sauté 2-3 slices of bacon in at least 1/4" of olive oil the bottom of a soup pot until crispy. Remove bacon and the bacon-olive-oil, and set aside.

Quarter a head of cabbage and peel off the icky outer leaves. Fill the bacon pot with water and boil the cabbage until soft. Maybe 20 mins? I didn't keep track. You know how to boil cabbage.

Once the cabbage is cooked, put in a roasting pan. Drizzle a little of the cooking water over top, to keep it from drying out in the oven. Drizzle the bacon-olive-oil over the cabbage and crumble the bacon over the cabbage.

Roast at 350 f for about 40 minutes. It's done when it starts to brown and the edges start to crisp. Salt before eating.

Fantastic.

Toad-in-the-Hole, Girl Scout Eggs, etc...

Making breakfast for myself while my husband sleeps in means that I can have whatever I want, without collaborating along the lines of what he's in the mood to cook or eat.

Today, right at this very moment in time, I am having one of my favorites: Toad-in-the-Hole, aka Girl Scout Eggs.




Step 1: Cut a hole in the bread.

Step 2: Fry an egg in the bread.

Step 3: Make her open the bread. And that's the way you do it.

Wait, what?

Back to topic.

Normally, I butter the bread a little before pan-frying, but today I just used a lot of olive oil. A LOT of olive oil. It is oilier than a donut. It's crunchy and greasy and very heavy. I am so full, guys, omg.

This is good because, on occasion, I love a seriously greasy breakfast and olive oil is one of the better greases for serious ingestion.

This is also good because I want to feel as full and sated as possible without actually preparing very much food, because I want to postpone my next trip to the grocery store for as long as I can.

One egg and one slice of bread (170 calories together, ungreased) are magically transformed into a huge meal by frying 'em up in olive oil (120 calories per tablespoon, and my bread absorbed somewhere between two and four tablespoons--I drizzled generously without measuring).

410 to 650 reasonably health-like calories for under $0.25, and I feel so fed that my next meal can just be lightly salted vegetables boiled in a nice broth for all I care.

Nice.

Hello Panda, I love you

Hello Panda is one of my favorite brands of commercially produced cookies.





I like them enough that my husband will actually point them out in the grocery store when he wants to get an immediate, cheerful response out of me. "Hey Lindsay, they have Hello Panda!" "Yeah they do! I love those things." I'll even drop whatever I'm talking about to acknowledge them, which makes these cookies a useful way for people around me to initiate fast changes in conversational topic.

(Other, similar strategies include pointing out nearby small animals--"Hey Lindsay, there's a dog across the street!"--fish tanks, Doctor Who paraphernalia, novelty socks, etc. I try to keep a lot of conversational eject buttons conveniently placed in my behavioral programming, because they do tend to come in handy. Now back to the subject of cookies.)

It's true that I am at least a little biased by how TOTALLY ADORABLE the cartoon panda on the box is, but the cookies inside are also lovely independent of their cute marketing strategy.

Hello Panda Cookies Are Nicely Portioned

Each little cookie is modestly sized, approximately 1" x 1" x 0.5" which makes portion control much easier than with many other delicious, commercially produced, boxed cookies.

The internet (whom I am tentatively trusting, because Nabisco's website only gives Oreo calorie information by the gram, not by the cookie) states that a single Oreo cookie contains 70 calories. Quite a lot of cardiovascular exercise and/or austere eating elsewhere is needed to offset a stack of Oreos, making them something of a special occasion cookie.




Hello Panda cookies are 20 calories each, and eating 3.5 of them (70 calories) feels like considerably more cookie time than a single Oreo does. While they are still genuinely cookies for cookies' sake, they're still a more manageable choice for cookie time in normal life.

In defense of Oreos, Hello Panda cookies are not as suitable for dunking in milk. But different cookies are best for different situations.

Hello Panda Cookies Have a Lovely Balance of Textures and Flavors

I likened Hello Panda cookies to Oreo cookies because the flavors and textures are reasonably comparable. They're quite different foods, but familiarity with one can help build a fuller imaginary representation of the other.

Both cookies have wonderful, crunchy exteriors and pleasing (if a little confusing) creamy middles.

Both cookies have chocolate-themed elements that are not actual chocolate, and both seem to be full of sweetened, mildly dangerous shortening. (IS it shortening? It is shortening, isn't it. Is it? Is it?)







Hello Panda cookies have a perfectly crunchy and mild biscuit exterior, and they are filled with a creamy, not-actually-ganache "choco cream."

The consistency of the biscuit layer is similar to that of the snack food style of small, hard pretzels. (Which I am making a little too much effort to distinguish from the larger, soft, baked, traditional pretzels.)

The Hello Panda outer cookie is slightly more brittle than a pretzel. It's less tough, less salty, and is a little thicker and sweeter, without being too sweet. The biscuit exterior gently cracks and snaps apart when bitten, and does not bend under pressure. The flavor resembles shortbread, but is less greasy and intense. (Shortbread isn't particularly intensely flavored, but these cookies are still milder.)

As mentioned before, the cookies have a delicious, chocolate-themed filling, similar to ganache but more shelf-stable. Like the outside, the filling is not overly sweet. To liken it to other chocolatey products found in many American grocery stores, the texture is slightly harder than Nutella but slightly softer than the inside of a a Lindt truffle.

The combination of crunch with smooth, of flour-based flavors with chocolate-like candy/frosting flavors, is very nice. Perfectly suited to the not-quite-a-baked-good, also-not-candy role that I have for crunchy, commercially produced, boxed cookies.

That, and, did you see how cute the cartoon panda is?!?! Wow.