Kitchen Garden Forum

I'm having sausage/onion and mash with green sprouting broccoli and curly kale from the garden. NO STALKS. Just a few with the broccoli. If I'm poorly I'm usually too poorly to cook or drive to buy ready-made dinners so stay in bed and manage on what my neighbour can rustle for me out of the fridge.

Beans on toast is a proper meal for this persnickety bloke, bit of ketchup though.
and a nice cuppa. I didn't say fussy.

This is most-definitely a personal view but I think stalks and over-cooking were responsible for people hating cabbage, kale and other brassica.

The M&S creamed cabbage with cheese and bacon tasted lovely and I didn't have to eat the stalks. Would you get stalks in a decent restaurant ?

I rarely eat out because whilst I'll eat mostly anything I'm persnickety about how my food is served, more particularly if I'm paying.

Wet and over-boiled cabbage with stalks, YUK.

Writing of stalks, Richard, what about lettuce stalks? Quite often, when salad is served in a restaurant, part of it comprises large lettuce leaves with thick stalks. To me, they are just as bad as cabbage stalks ....

I don't like lettuce stalks either, or cabbage stalks in coleslaw!

Lettuce stalks don't bother me though I do nip out the bottom of the stalk on larger Little Gem type lettuce.

I have been wondering about the loss when you cut the stalks out, I don't like the stalks so they spoil the experience and taste. The tough stalks are a challenge for my teeth, the tender stalks are not part of the food I love and Black Cabbage stalks are horrible.

I eat potatoes with the skin, lovely.

Morning Richard, i do have to praise you for making what should be quite a boring sounding topic (cabbage staks) turn into a serious but light hearted conversation.....you even make your topic titles sound interesting.

You seem to have a wonderful knack of doing this with all your topics, or your replies to other peoples questions for that matter, so i just wanted you know that we all appreciate it.

I had some nice cabbage stalks last night....

Very kind of you to compliment me on raising a boring topic and very kind of all the responding members who found the time too discuss cabbage stalks.

I'll get my coat.

Until more serious stuff emerges I sometimes just need a little company and someone to bounce-off.

All seedlings, salad leaves, rocket, parsley, leaks and coriander are doing well and under mini poly-tunnels. Cabbage, more salad and sweet-pea now sown.

Mini slugs have got to my rhubarb that is under forcers so I put pellets down.

Does that help ?

I may as well be shot if I'm being hung, so......

The reason for the title-part "Politics" is the amount of media effort to interest people back to eating cabbage. First it was sprouts, next came cabbage then came Black cabbage.

On the issue of sprouts the media effort was to illustrate that growers had grown new strains that didn't make you poop and tasted sweet. On cabbage they went for dinner ladies.

I can't think of anything else to say other than I'm better now and will bother you only on important matters in future.

Only joking OH, I do have a robust sense of humour.

Afternoon Richard, i know i'm a bit of a joker but, i do like to give people credit where it is due. The last thing i would ever want to do is upset someone over a post, So my words of praise to you were certainly genuing.
Maybe what i write, quite often reads slightly wrong as my grasp of sentences leads a lot to be desired. I often write a sentence two or three times, but it still doesn't really portray what i'm trying to say.

So there you have it........

oldherbaceous wrote:Maybe what i write, quite often reads slightly wrong as my grasp of sentences leads a lot to be desired. I often write a sentence two or three times, but it still doesn't really portray what i'm trying to say.

So there you have it........

OH, I understood perfectly. I'm just adding a little more humour and thanks again for complimenting me on creating a thread about cabbage stalks. Someone once accused me of being able to write a novel about a piece of string, I also took that as a compliment.

As an aside, you having a cook to prepare for you when you come home makes me very envious. I'm living the life of Riley, I'm not cash-rich though I am environment-rich. Stumbling through the door after a productive day to a prepared plate of food would be the only thing missing and though I manage and I eat well, it is a burden at times to cook for one when it's a toss-up between tired and hungry.

The green broccoli stalks are tasty, I'll cut more stalk next time I harvest.

My dear Mum used to say, "If you eat that many cabbage stalks you'll never write good sentences"......

Primrose wrote:On the question of removing stalks I've heard of people snapping off the stalks of loose calabrese in supermarkets before going to the till because they don't want to pay for food they will be throwing away. I wonder if they'd have the nerve to take along a sharp knife and start cutting the bones out of lamb chops on the meat counter!

Seems a great ploy these days, sell sprouts on the stalk, Toms on the vine,
all adds weight at numpty pence per kg.
Why on earth do people pay for something they cant eat.

It is only in recent years since we got into this 'grow your veg' thing that we have taken to eating brassica's of any description.
Why is that ? because Mrs Snip's mother and my mother both boiled the damn things to death. Sad to say that when we were younger any form of brassica stunk the house out and were a yucky tasteless mush.

But we don't eat the stalk of the leaves of cabbage or kale its cut out, except on young purple sprouting broccoli tips.

Pa Snip wrote:Seems a great ploy these days, sell sprouts on the stalk, Toms on the vine,
all adds weight at numpty pence per kg.
Why on earth do people pay for something they cant eat.

I like this, it always irritates me buying tomatoes described as, "Vine tomato". It also irritates me when I buy sprouting broccoli how much tough stalk the cheeky monkeys leave on. Ok, if you buy a whole cabbage you get stalks but if you buy a packet of prepared cabbage, or whatever, you also pay for stalks.

I have never bought prepared greens, the issue that raised this thread was prepared cabbage turned into a dish called, "Creamed cabbage with bacon and cheese". I didn't want nor did I expect stalks.

I'm not good at complaining so I tend to regard a problem as a lesson learnt and not to go there again.

I will be getting in touch with M&S.

I remove stalks and thick mid ribs from cabbage too.....I just don't like it. I like calabrese stalks though.
I certainly wouldn't expect to find stalks and thick mid ribs in an M&S ready meal, at the prices they charge...you do right to inform them of this Richard. Many years ago, I worked on the food department at M&S and their foods were always made to a strict specification to the manufacturers. They need to know feedback from customers, good or bad...the feedback that is, not the customers.

It will be interesting to find out what they have to say about it.

It amazes me why people are prepared to pay so much more for Vine tomatoes.....they all grow on vines don't they????

Thanks for joining the thread Elaine, I haven't yet made the complaint I intend making. I searched for a suitable phone number to call so I wouldn't have to call their premium number customer services line, that also irritates me.

I just cut more of the green sprouting broccoli I've grown, it's called Raab and I'm sure it was a free packet of seed with the magazine. It's starting to flower so I'm rushing to eat it complete with flowers. More to the point, the stalks are so tender you could shred them for salad.

Even some cabbage stalks are a delight to eat raw but I don't want to pay M&S prices for quality products and buy woody stalks.

I popped into our local Co-op for some milk and other essentials so checked out what they were offering in the prepped-vegetables. Curly kale chopped complete with stalks and a pale-type cabbage chopped complete with stalks. At least they won't have any caterpillars because they'll have been hammered with insecticides.

I wonder how many of us manage to grow organically ?