Sauerkraut

Emily hates it.

So do I. And this is why.

To give a little background, Miles and I are in a dinner club with seven other couples. We meet every other month, and its hosted by a different person each time. The hosts pick the theme, assign the recipes and make the main dish. This is a wonderful thing. Usually.

Last Saturday, the hosts were holding Oktoberfest (since the schedule skips October, this was a good idea). Miles was going to be in Reno for his mom's birthday, so I was flying solo. My assigned recipe was cabbage rolls, German-style.

And this is my opinion of the cabbage rolls, as taken directly from an e-mail I sent Miles just before midnight Saturday.

Anyway: as predicted, my house SMELLS. When "smells" appears in all caps, this is not a good connotation. This is, rather, the type of SMELLS that would punctuate any good tale of immigrant woe. Doesn't matter what immigrant group at this point. I've discovered that every poor subsection of society has some awful cabbage-based recipe. Today, we think that's quaint ethnic food. In some parts of the world, this is all they've got. And I'm sorry to report that it makes any kitchen and, by extension, the entire home, smell like a fucking Shanghai laundry.

You think I'm kidding about that whole "everyone uses cabbage" part? I'm not. Cabbage rolls featured hugely in my family. They were meat mixed with filler, rolled in cabbage leaves, put in a pot and covered in some tomato-saucy concoction. This was a Lebanese staple. Later, I found a Greek version. And a British. And a Polish. And today, German. I suspect every ethnicity has a variation on the cabbage roll. And every last one stinks to high heaven.

For instance, the German version adds another level of hell by covering the cabbage rolls in sauerkraut. Fu-cking sauerkraut! Because the dish doesn't have enough cabbage to begin with.

Why the torture? I can't imagine what compelled people to think that, when they could be eating just the meat mixture fried or baked, all by itself, that rolling the stuff up in cabbage would make it better somehow. Nutritionally, it's a wash. You don't need the cabbage. I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and say that cabbage is the most useless excuse for a vegetable. Ever.

I mean, Christ Almighty! Even iceburg lettuce gets more play than this.

The only thing I can find that redeems cabbage is cole slaw. And even THAT is a tough sell, worthiness-wise. At that point, cabbage is a condiment -- its utility based solely upon what you can slather it in.

Why is this consuming so much of this e-mail?

Because MY HOUSE SMELLS TERRIBLE.

I just moved, folks. I love my new home. To have it smell that bad was really bothering me. It still has a little cabbage miasma hanging around.

To be fair, I may have been a little hard on the cabbage. It does have a lot of vitamin C. So I'm not getting scurvy. There's that.

Anyway, when I read Emily's hatred of sauerkraut and the subsequent love-hate discussion that followed, this post seemed appropriate.

Sauerkraut? Hate. Definitely hate.