restaurant Cookbook

Farikal

Traditional Scandinavian dish: meat cooked with cabbage. If you\'re used to Mediterranean cuisine (e.g. Italian or Greek), Northern food can taste pretty bland. The flavors are much more subtle, but not bad, just different. This recipe makes about 4-6 servings and takes about 10 minutes to prep and another 2 hours to cook.

• You will need:
• 1/2lb meat (preferably lamb, but beef or pork works)
• 1 head cabbage
• butter or oil
• 1 tablespoon of whole black pepper
• salt

Cut your cabbage in half and in half again, remove the core and slice the rest (big slices are ok). You can slice your meat or keep it whole. Put everything in a pot, cover with water, and simmer on low heat for two hours. If you have a slow-cooker, that works even better. Tip: you can pick out the black pepper from the plate as you eat your farikal (because if you bite it it will be unpleasant), or you can tie it in a piece of cheesecloth before placing it in the pot, and then just remove it once the farikal has cooked.

The cabbage/meat combination is popular in other countries, in slightly different variations. For example, traditional Polish bigos (also known as hunter\'s stew) is sauerkraut fried in oil or butter with pork, bacon, and kielbasa sausage. If you want it fast and easy - just get a bag of coleslaw mix (dry, no dressing, just the chopped cabbage) and a couple of franks; chop them up, and fry everything on high till the cabbage starts turning from light brown to dark brown. You can also fry the cabbage alone, without any meat. It tastes pretty good on its own, and is very healthy. We also have another cabbage/meat recipe in this section, the sarma.