Eat My Professional Photographs of Food Blog: Goblin Ear Stew with Tomatoes and Oregano

Spoilers: it's cabbage soup with some kind of meat added. No actual goblins were harmed in the making of this soup. Possibly derived from “glumkis” or “Gołąbki,” Polish stuffed cabbage. You ever notice the veins on cabbage leaves? If you don't slice them into thin ribbons, if you leave little squares or triangles of cabbage, they get all rubbery after cooking but they retain their shape and you can still see those veins.

My mom makes cabbage soup that might have been influenced by the Polish community in the white-flight ring of suburbs outside of Detroit where she grew up. Or maybe every culture gets around to trying cabbage with tomatoes and ground beef. She's three or four generations removed from Dutch and English ancestors.

Yes, I spill something over the eye of my cutting board
every time in homage to Watchmen. Sorry.

Ma has dozens of recipes committed to memory. When I asked how she made cabbage soup, she listed what she had used in the latest batch.

1 head of cabbage, chopped

8-10 Roma tomatoes, chopped

6 regular tomatoes, chopped

2 x 15 oz. cans tomatoes

2 big cans of tomatoes (28 oz. each?)

4 pounds ground beef

½ pound to 1 pound onion, diced or chopped

carrots, chopped

48 oz vegetable stock

32 oz beef stock

rice (optional)

If you've never seen a bowl of thawed ground turkey before, I took a picture just for you.

Why use canned and fresh tomatoes? Is there alchemical magic in that precise combination, or did she get sick of chopping tomatoes? Something special in the proportion of veg to beef stock, or is that what she had on hand?

Tomatoes look like this. Roma tomatoes are often cheapest.

I'm going to try to keep those proportions of cabbage to tomato to beef to stock, but I'm not doing a lot of math to get there. Also I don't need 30 servings, so I'll do:

½ head of red cabbage, thicker leaves shaped into spade or heart shapes as you imagine a goblin's ear might look; the rest sliced or chopped

2 pounds tomatoes

2 pound ground turkey (because it's cheaper than beef)

2 cups diced red onion

2 carrots, chopped

2 cups stock (I used no-sodium chicken plus sodium-saturated beef stock)

4 cups tomato juice

1 tsp dried leaf oregano (too much?)

salt & pepper to taste

a quantity of rice (optional)

Cook the ground turkey and onion over medium heat until the turkey is browned. Keep cooking until most of the liquid has evaporated, stirring frequently for 10 or 15 minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients except rice. If it doesn't look like enough liquid to cover everything, add more tomato juice or stock. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to simmer. Let it go for an hour or so until the carrots are soft and the cabbage is magnifique. You could cook the rice in the soup if you want, but then it's going to absorb most of the water. I like it a little soupier, and I'm going to amortize my investment in that damned rice cooker as often as I can, so I start the rice cooking separately when I start the soup. I'll add the finished rice when the soup is done.

Before cooking.

I've thought about preparing a pot of Goblin Ear Stew to accompany a session of Dungeons & Dragons. Monsters in the game have captured your characters. If you're willing to eat some of their Goblin Ear Stew (in the game and in real life), they'll be amused and let you live longer. If you can't stomach it in real life, then your character can't stomach it in the game, and they'll add you to the stew.

The money shot with goblin ears displayed. Next time I'll skip the greenish outer leaves and use some purpler inner leaves. Also those parts where the leaf gets all curled up in itself really look like the folds of a human ear, or a bat snout. Perfect.

But I also want people to like it, and I know most people aren't fans of cooked cabbage or tomatoes. If they reject it, I might feel like a bad cook instead of a great prankster Dungeon Master.

If I was making this for myself, I would chop the cabbage into
1 or 2 inch pieces instead of shredding the rest.
Your mileage may vary.

So I'm going to test it out on my co-workers. We're having a soup & salad potluck. The department is mostly ladies, so they're a little more adventurous than guys are. They'll even do “mercy sampling” like I sometimes do: seeing a dish that's been untouched and taking some so the person who brought it won't feel unloved. I won't mention that I call it Goblin Ear Stew, but I'll share the recipe on Facebook and see if they notice. I'll let you know how it went.

... It went well. I took pictures with big "goblin ear" leaf shapes at home, but cut them down to size and mixed them in before taking it to work. I only mentioned the name "Goblin Ear Stew" to a few friends after they said they don't like cabbage anyway. The crockpot was half empty at the end of the potluck, so about a quart was gone. Four people said they liked it, and one asked if I had used something to sweeten it. I couldn't remember any particularly sweet ingredients except maybe the carrots or the chicken broth base.