ROAST A CABBAGE FOR GRAIN BOWLS, MYRIAD OPTIONS

Leftover veggie goes well as side, added to other dishes

A lot of people ask me where I get recipe ideas, and the long, complicated answer is that I get them from many places. Sometimes a recipe in a cookbook sparks my imagination; sometimes a dish at a restaurant inspires me to test a new-tome flavor combination. Sometimes it’s a lot more abstract — I’ll be at a museum looking at a painting, or reading a book of poetry, and like a flash, an idea will pop into my head.

But my favorite source of inspiration is when I get an idea from a friend. Today’s recipe, for roasted cabbage bowls with quinoa and soft-boiled eggs, evolved from a conversation I had with my friend Julia.

Julia Bainbridge is a writer and author of the book “Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason.” She’s also a dear friend, so, some weeks ago, when I saw on Instagram that she was making a big batch of roasted cabbage to use in a salad one day and in a rice bowl another, I asked her about it.

She explained that it was part of an informal meal plan effort. That week, she’d made a big batch of roasted cabbage, then mixed and remixed it with leftovers into a variety of meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“I’m just one person in my household, plus a whole cabbage is often more than what a recipe calls for, anyway,” Julia says. “Shredding and roasting the rest is a great way to use it up, and it cooks down really nicely.”

Her method is simple: Halve and then slice a whole cabbage into about

ribbons and toss them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast for 25 minutes, at which point some of the cabbage will have turned soft and silky, and some of it will have crisped in the heat. Then, add it to virtually anything savory.

Julia tosses it with cold soba noodles and tofu dressed with a drizzle of sesame oil; adds it to salads with radicchio and leftover roasted chicken; sprinkles it over rice with eggs; and stirs it into simple dishes such as pasta e ceci, where the cabbage adds some heft and deep crunch.

“The key to this batchcooked and then mixedand-matched approach to building meals is having good sauces and seasonings around,” she says, noting that the blank slate of the roasted cabbage is a versatile base for so many meals.

I developed this recipe with Julia’s roasted cabbage in mind. You start with 2 pounds of cabbage, which is more than you’ll need for these quinoa bowls, and that’s by design. The idea is that the leftover cabbage can sit in a container in your fridge for the next week as you pull from it for various meals. One of them might be these quinoa bowls with roasted cabbage and softboiled eggs. The quinoa gets dressed with raisins and vinegar for an agrodolce effect, and the whole thing gets a finishing sprinkle of furikake.

What to do with the rest of the cabbage? Here are a few ideas:

• Stir it into a pot of brothy beans.

• Toss it with lettuce, herbs, lemon juice and olive oil-packed tuna.

• Add it to a grain bowl. • Top congee with it plus a drizzle of chili crisp.

• Serve it as a side to baked or pan-fried tofu or chicken.

• Chop it finely and make a cooked cabbage slaw.

• Let it simmer into a vegetable or chicken soup.