Recipe of the Month: Cannellini Beans with Cabbage and Pasta

Slipping in just ahead of the deadline, our Recipe of the Month for September is "Cannellini Beans with Cabbage and Pasta," out of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I'd actually bookmarked this recipe months if not years ago as something we should try, but we never got around to it until last week. We had some cabbage in the fridge, and I was looking for something to do with it besides our usual old standbys (Rumbledethumps, Indian-spiced cabbage, or the "Bow Ties and Cabbage" out of Vegetariana). We read through the ingredients for the recipe—cabbage, pasta, olive oil, leeks, celery, fresh thyme, veggie stock, and cooked cannellini beans—and found that we happened to have all of them right on hand, so this was clearly the time to give the recipe a try.

This dish isn't very complicated to make. Briefly, you boil the cabbage for just a few minutes ("until just tender") in one big pot, then use that same water to cook the pasta; meanwhile, you sauté the leeks and celery in a big skillet until they're soft, add the thyme and stir for one more minute, and finally stir in the cabbage, beans, and stock, season it, and heat it through. When the pasta's all done, you drain it and toss everything together, and serve it up with Parmesan cheese.

We didn't make this recipe exactly as written, however. It calls for half a cabbage to half a pound of pasta, but what we had in the fridge was more like a third of a cabbage, and Brian didn't want to have any left over. So he decided to make a half recipe, thereby using up a quarter-pound of rotelle that he also happened to have left over, but with a little bit more cabbage than the recipe called for. The "sprig" of thyme he added was also probably rather larger than Bittman had in mind (you can see it in the photo, resting on top of the pasta in the pot).

Fortunately, the dish appeared to stand up pretty well to the minor liberties. It was a bit heavy on the cabbage, but not too bad, and thanks to our favorite Penzey's vegetable stock, the veggies were quite flavorful. So was the pasta itself, since Brian has lately taken to following Bittman's advice to salt the water liberally when making it—a good tablespoonful of salt to a large pot of water. This innovation has caused us to adjust all our pasta sauces accordingly, adding a lot less salt than we used to, and I personally found that this dish didn't need any added Parmesan to raise its flavor. The half-plus recipe he made was enough to feed us both for dinner, with a little bit left over for the next day's lunch.

All in all, I think this dish will be a very useful addition to our repertoire. Cabbages are one of the few fresh veggies that remain cheap and decent-tasting all winter long, so we buy them fairly regularly, and it will definitely be handy to have a new way of using them that's both easy and satisfying. And if we get tired of it, we can always try the variant version of the recipe, "Chickpeas with Cabbage and Pearl Couscous," which spices it up with a tablespoon of harissa (north African chili paste). That ought to make a good warmer-upper for the winter months.