of cabbages and condiments

A friend of mine was joking recently about how much she loves cabbage. Sure, I dig cabbage. It's delicious in coleslaw, stir-fried (especially on it's own with lemon juice and garlic), in curries and soups, in dumplings or spring-rolls, or as a wrapper for cabbage rolls. I like it in Asian noodle salads. I love the recipe from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook of cabbage salad with candied walnuts (and her nearly raw tahini noodle salad), and this Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup of hers looks delicious too. Another friend linked to this exciting-looking Dutch comfort food recipe (easily veganisable). Ok, so there are lots of things you can do with cabbage. But it's the weekend and I wanted something easy, fried and delicious that didn't require me to go shopping. And I knew exactly what to do with that cabbage all lonely in our refrigerator...

Behold,  

Fusion Barbeque Cabbage Pancake!

This is inspired by my attempt one time to recreate vegan okonomiyaki, especially without tofu, because we seldom have it. There are heaps of good recipes abounding on the net, for example: the beautiful and thorough tutorial here, or this one using a Japanese yam. But lacking ingredients for these, I just went with cabbage pancake. I'd like to try again with spring onions and using broth in the mix and ginger and proper stuff to put on it like tonkatsu sauce and spicy vegan mayo. But I had some newly purchased HP sauce that I was looking for an excuse to put on everything...

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Finely chop some cabbage, maybe 2 - 3 cups. Grate 1-2 carrots.
2. Dump some flour (maybe 1 1/2 cups) and some chick pea flour (1/2 cup) in a bowl. Add 1 tsp baking powder and some salt. Mix it all around. Add the veges. Shouldn't be too much flour left over in the bowl, and all the veges should be covered in flour. Add more of something if ratio doesn't look good.
3. Preheat a frying pan with some oil on medium heat.
4. To your flour and veg, add 1-2 flax eggs (optional), 1 tsp light-coloured vinegar, and enough water to make a thick sticky batter (spoonable, rather than pourable).
5. Spoon into pan and flatten out into a large pancake. Fry gently on both sides until set and cooked through.

Serving suggestion: fried onions, HP sauce, smoked salt, sriracha sauce.