Roast Turkey with Cabbage

I recently bought a cabbage. It's not something I usually buy, and I didn't have a plan for it when I bought it; it was sort of an open-ended challenge to myself. The recipe I ended up going for appears on page 700 of Bittman. It's meant to be done starting with a raw turkey breast. I chose to instead use some leftover shreds of smoked turkey that have been sitting in my freezer for some time.

The recipe also requires 2tbs minced garlic (though I used maybe double that), 2 tbs minced ginger (though I probably only had half that much on hand), sesame oil, salt, and pepper.



You want to end up with two cups of roughly chopped cabbage and two cups of finely chopped cabbage. I had probably 3 cups of bite-sized smoked dark meat turkey.

The coarsely chopped cabbage (and, in my case, the turkey) go in a frying pan for about fifteen minutes. Halfway through that the garlic and ginger get added. This should be set aside while you wait for the other half. The recipe suggests cooking the turkey with the other half of the cabbage but since mine was frozen instead of raw I felt I would have better control over it on the stovetop.

The small shreds go on a pan in the oven with salt and pepper at 450F. Bittman says to put them in for 25-30 minutes. That's wrong. My smoke alarm went off after 20 because the cabbage bits were completely obliterated. I threw them out, chopped some more, and had better success with 10 minutes.



When the cabbage comes out of the oven it should be starting to get crispy. Throw everything from the frying pan on top of it and return it to the oven for five minutes.



This probably made about four meals' worth of food, if eaten with some sides. And in fact it would be tough to eat by itself. I had forgotten how salty smoked turkey already is so when I tried the finished product it was VERY salty. Still edible. Just not great.