I mean, it has all the makings of a good casserole. It just needs some egg noodles and a casserole dish. But I guess making it for just me it’s more in the “skillet” category.
So I had roughly diced and boiled a head of cabbage, and I still had about a pint of leftovers from that.
I also had half a can of diced tomatoes left from making shakshuka. Ground beef was what I’d thawed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but when I the a pound of ground beef, I usually split it into quarters and use one loose for that day’s meal, and I make the other three quarters into hamburger patties and refreeze them.
So this was my starting point, and then I went to see what other people online were doing with these ingredients – and the results were almost universally soup. I was not feeling like soup. So this is winging it.
I started off browning the meat with some onions and diced serrano peppers, and then I minced and added three cloves of garlic.
There’s some “tagine spice” in my cabinet that a friend brought me back from France. It smells more like a sweet curry powder than a ras el hanout, so it feels weird using it in either context. But this seemed like a great reason to use up a tablespoon or so. And then I added about a tablespoon of flour and stirred everything well until all of the flour was sticking to the meat and had cooked a bit.
And then I added liquids – the leftover canned tomatoes, some nut milk, and I decided to count the cabbage as kinda liquid, too. After stirring everything thoroughly, I made sure everything came to a boil to cook the starches. And then I stirred it again and let it simmer until most of the water had evaporated and the sauce was very thick. I did have a moment of my ancestors (well, my mother) telling me that this dish needed a dash of Worcestershire sauce, but I don’t have any, so ancestral advice was ignored. But if you’re inspired by this, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some.
Re: nut milk – I had impulse bought some pistachio milk (unsweetened!) because I’d never seen it before, and Even though it’s delicious and fancy, it’s always a struggle getting through that much of any kind of milk before it goes bad. So I was delighted I found an excuse to use it, too!
It was delicious! I was so full!