Cabbage Soup

We were shopping earlier this week and purchased a head of cabbage - all 14 pounds of it. Yes, one head, 14 pounds!

One VERY large head! Clearly too large to put in a pot to loosen the leaves for stuffed cabbage. So I went to my box of recipes to try and located a recipe from the local paper for "Sally Beckering's Cabbage Soup". Of course I made some changes but it's basically her soup.

First off, cut the cabbage - so I took about a fourth of it.  

I decided to first chop the onions and celery and start them cooking in 6 cups of water. Diced about 3 stalks of celery and then a rather large onion. I use coffee liners to hold this type of thing as it makes it easier to add to the pot when cooking.

I then cut the cut the piece of cabbage into rather large slices and then chopped it into small pieces. Since the recipe called for a medium head of cabbage and I was cutting back on the water, I went with 10 cups of chopped cabbage. I added this to the simmering water and cooked 1 pound of 85% hamburger in another pan while I stirred the simmering soup every so often.

After simmering the cabbage, onion and celery until tender (about 20 minutes) I added 2 8 oz cans of tomato sauce, 1 15 oz can of diced tomatoes with juice and a teaspoon of beef base and the drained ground beef.  I also had some tomato slices left from last night's dinner so I chopped them and added to the soup. Stirred well and after bringing up to a boil, I turned the soup down and had myself a glass of wine!

I let it summer about 20 minutes.

I then added 1/3 cup of catchup, stirred well and let it simmer while I cleaned things up and set the table. The recipe also had you adding some brown sugar which I did NOT do.

It was very good - a filling soup for a cold fall night. 

Since it was cool out last night I just plopped the lid on the pan and set it out on the deck (fenced in and up rather high)

This morning I brought it in and filled 3 freezer quart containers. I think I'll freeze two and we will have the third for lunch sometime over the next few days.

This was good and would have even been better had I served freshly baked bread (dream away).

At this point I'm not sure how I will use the rest of the cabbage.