NAPPA CABBAGE

THIS WAS/IS CHAPTER 5 IN MY BOOK.

i dunno if i will ever finish the book or even write one at all... most lazy celebs just print out their blog or tweets and bind it and call it a book. and as much as i am no celebrity, i am lazy as hell. so its a thought in the right direction...

plus the nappa connection i had at the market Mr Lee just got bought out, so unfortunately those prices and his fun personality is gone now.

here goes...

CH 5… nappa cabbage

Few things on nappa cabbage. First if you never had nappa cabbage you aren’t in for a treat. But your live-in plants and animals better run for zee hills. Second if you have then you know what I mean… bring on the gas.

Its not all bad though. I happen to have stumbled upon it in my local market. The Asian man behind the counter tried to get me to buy kimchi for the longest time, but Mr. Lee at farmers market in Harrisburg always seems happy to see me. If you were studying him you’d know I am coming ‘cause you can see his face light up when he sees me. I like to sneak up on him and have him turn around in surprise. He knows I’m in for at least sixteen dollars a stop every time, and that’s a week’s worth of nappa cabbage and other various veggies every week or so.

He perks up with a smile “how you?”

-good you?

“mehhhhhhhhhhhh” (sounding very Jon Stewart-ish with a bit of Mr. Miyagi flair)

That’s it. That’s all I get out of him. He’s a nice older Asian man though. If you don’t get a basket then he doesn’t know you are there to seriously produce shop. I think he makes it by from every few people that may just buy a single grape. Me? I’m there to rape the stock of nappa cabbage and get a few essentials. Cukes, toms, pots, onions, and the occasional head of romaine, my staple before seeing nappa.

The guy has a son maybe or another younger version of him behind the counter too. Looks to be in his late 20s or early thirties. He always asks me what or how I prepare the cabbage… I just cut it and eat it raw. He said there’s different ways to prepare it. So that’s why he always asks me, yet if his girl (wife, sister, I dunno) is there they always say something in their eastern language and laugh. Like “Look at this imbecile eating this raw. If he only knew. Aaaahahahaha… ” Yet if he knew what I knew he’d sell it at a higher price cause at market I am getting it for over half the price at the local Wal-mart.

You wonder why you are reading this and that will come, it has nothing to do with the nappa cabbage. Well, ok, something to do with it.

What is nappa cabbage you ask? Well, I don’t really know. I tell people it’s the cross between a head of cabbage and a head of romaine lettuce. It tastes like a light cabbage and if you take it apart leaf by leaf you could use the leaves as a wrap around different meats or whatever. Ask Mr. Lee’s younger counterpart. Or they use it in the making of kimchi.

Kimchi is nappa cabbage in a bell jar with hot sauces and such possibly fermented or whatever. I don’t know how they make it. But if you like spicy hot food, kimchi is your friend. If you just did it for the taste, well, be forewarned. After trying it it took more than a few fork fulls and many hours, err, days to finish the small bell jar full. But its big to the Asian countries or so I am told. I don’t know what the word “kimchi” means. For all I know it could mean “imbecile”, cause you have to be one to try it without knowing what it is.   

After trying nappa cabbage though you may get hooked on it. So if you do try what I do. I like to have the top half in one sitting then the bottom half in another. With a healthy dosing of dressing, some sliced onions, and a jar of grocery style green olives. But be careful. Bottom of the barrel olives can end up having more than the pimento in them so if you are eating it chomp lightly. (sometimes there’s a seed in them, which proves painful to sensitive teeth).

Because you have to add a healthy dosing of dressing I have gone from the normal gazebo room dressing to the balsamic vinaigrette gazebo room, to finally the lite version of the original. {My grandma used to make this dressing that if she could bottle it she’d be the next [insert old person with awesome product here], yet if you stood next to her, used the same ingredients, used the same style of tossing the salad, etc etc, yours would taste like shit and hers would be the winner. I swear it was the blood sweat and tears she put into every meal. Her salad tops all in the best of everything. Put it this way… when, at thanksgiving, you could eat turkey, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie, throw in some angel food cake and cranberries for good measure, after you’ve unbuttoned your pants to allow more room, and then have a second helping of everything, then go pass out, I’d show up with a plate and a fork and mound up all the salad to top it off. To hell with dessert. Salad, especially hers, was my favorite.}

Thinking of that salad just makes me wipe off the keyboard now from drooling and daydreaming… where was i? oh yeah… counting your money for buying this atrocity.

Gazebo room, the reason you are reading this chapter is onefold. But I’ll give you two. Folding halves things so here goes… One. The first gazebo room is the closest thing to grams dressing yet she used something like oil vinegar and spices, but it was her own concoction. Two. Read the food label recently on your salad dressings? The one I have is for gazebo room lite. (sp) First I see amount per serving… calories, 40. not bad. I like this stuff so it shouldn’t be so bad. A few squeezes on my salad and I’m good to go. 30 of those calories are from fat though so hey, you’re eating salad. How bad could a few fat calories be? And where do they find the next 10 calories. Or is that supposed to be added together so it’s a total of 70 calories per serving??? I have no idea, but again that’s not the point. There’s 4 grams of fat, then below it it says saturated fat .5g. below that once again it says trans fat 0g. so is it 4.5 grams of fat or what else is the 3.5 g of regular not saturated or trans fat doing? Its no wonder we have no idea how to read these labels. It just shows us numbers that most of us don’t read. {Ask a smoker if he ever cared what warnings on packs said. As Mr. Hicks suggested something to the effect of “I just get the ones that say ‘may cause breast cancer and problems in the pregnancy’… I’m a man! Aaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha” knowing he died of lung cancer, that bit isn’t one of my favorites.} Pack into your serving size 90 mg of sodium and you think you have a nice healthy snack right?

Look again.

Under the big words of nutrition facts guess what? The serving size is a tablespoon. Yup. That entire paragraph above couldn’t fit in a tablespoon. Ever have a tablespoon of cough medicine? Me neither. Take a swig.

A f*cking tablespoon.

How am I supposed to enjoy a half a head of nappa cabbage with a tablespoon of dressing on it??? You know what you say when you see a person measuring out a tablespoon of dressing on it? “There’s an imbecile! I bet he likes kimchi!”

Moral? Next time you are at the store, try some nappa cabbage, and 32 servings of gazebo room lite, err, one bottle. You’ll thank me later, but your family may hate me for it.