Cabbage Soup Recipe

A great winter soup to warm you through

Among my favorite soups is a simple, mildly spicy and hearty cabbage soup. It’s great in winter, very warming and comforting to me. It’s pretty inexpensive too.

The recipe harkens back to my undergraduate days when I was briefly a vegetarian. In those days, “vegetarian” wasn’t really a thing you could find in the campus cafeterias, or even in restaurants in my price range. So, I had to make most of my vegetarian meals. This difficulty is part of why I stopped being a vegetarian — that, and no one I knew was a vegetarian. Indeed, back in the mid-1980s, I was confidently assured that vegetarians were “deeply weird.”

The Soup Development

This soup is my own recipe. It was developed on an extreme budget. Someone in the dorm made stuffed cabbage for a dorm holiday dinner. She gave me the leftover raw cabbage to assure I would have something to eat at our little dinner party. So, I went to the grocery and bought what I could afford. The only thing I splurged on was the herbs — they just smelled so heavenly that I had to include them.

I had some of those packets of Chinese hot sauce back then, as you acquire with Chinese takeout. A year or so ago, my son brought home a jar of that Chinese Chili Sauce pictured in the image below. I love that stuff! Now, I put it in anything I used to put crushed red pepper or hot sauce into.