Buttery Noodles with Melted Cabbage

A comforting pantry meal to tide us over until spring

Ahoy!

I got home at 5:30 a.m. this morning (wildly unexciting story to follow) from a sleep clinic where I spent the night hooked up to a million sensors and a CPAP machine to see if it would help my crazy snoring. And even though I feel like I barely slept, I am weirdly chipper, which would seem to indicate this could be me in the near-future:

In which case you KNOW I will be prancing around the house for months spontaneously screaming, “No one cared who I was until I put on the mask!!!!” to the cat, who will scream right back at me to feed him. Again.

Anyway.

It’s Thursday and I have a new recipe to share with y’all for Buttery Noodles with Melted Cabbage that is so good it’s been on the work-from-home lunch rotation several times in the last couple of weeks. It turns half a head of cabbage into a deeply satisfying pantry meal for two by pairing it with noodles, some staple sauces (oyster, soy), and a good pat of butter to bring it all together.

It’s hard to think of a vegetable that’s gotten a sexier rebrand in the last handful of years than the humble green cabbage. It’s sexy seared in a hot pan, still plenty juicy and crisp-tender, but with some charred bits. It’s sexy cut into big wedges and grilled or roasted or braised, alone or with friends. My friend Andy figured out how to gratin it and that, too, was sexy. And if you’re really on that cruciferous veg tip you’ll know that

Hetty Lui McKinnon

of the newsletter To Vegetables, With Love is the queen of cabbage (I’ve had her Cabbage and Tofu Mei Fun bookmarked since she dropped the recipe).

But these days I find cabbage most alluring when it’s slowly cooked down to almost nothing, sweet and silky and tender, with plenty of caramelized bits. That’s what I’m channeling in this recipe, which was very loosely inspired by Amelia Rampe’s Melted Fennel Pasta recipe on Bon Appétit, which also looks so good. The soft tangles of golden cabbage are the perfect tango partner to chewy noodles, and the salty funky notes from soy and oyster sauce balance the cabbage’s natural sweetness. I love this recipe because it breaks every rule in the modern “recipe rulebook”: It’s beige AF, doesn’t have much acid, is rather mono-textured, and has no garnishes besides perhaps a drizzle of toasted sesame oil. Sometimes, this is exactly the food I want to eat. I hope you’ll try it.

See you all on Sunday for another edition of From The Pantry!

-Chaey

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Buttery Noodles with Melted Cabbage

2-3 servings

Make sure you use a properly large skillet for this recipe, otherwise the cabbage won’t all fit in the pan. You can use any noodle you want, but since the flavors here skew Asian, I would use something like dried thin udon noodles, frozen fat udon noodles, flat rice noodles, or fresh ramen (pictured here). Shredded leftover rotisserie chicken, ribbons of yuba, or thin planks of baked tofu would be really yummy mix-ins. Two helpful tools I would use are a good pair of tongs and a sturdy wooden utensil for scraping up the browned bits of cabbage and onion as they caramelize—I got this Earlywood flat wooden spatula (non-affiliate link) as a gift and it has since become my preferred tool for exactly this sort of task.