Cole slaw

One of the frustrations of shopping with My Prince is that he sometimes gets these wild notions of what he thinks he will eat. We go through this all the time with apples. He wants apples, they sit around in the kitchen and shrivel up, and all the time he is saying that he's gonna eat 'em. And then I throw them away.

Recently we had one of those discussions when he wanted to buy a bale of cole slaw. The local warehouse store often has cole slaw in 5 lb. (I think) bags. This is way more than we would normally need if I were going to use cole slaw as a side dish. This is way more than My Prince would ever remember to dig out of the crisper and consume in some other bizarre way (cooking is so not his forte). I let him buy the bag of cole slaw, thinking, however, that we would just have another object lesson a la the apples.

Then I had a brain flash. I recalled those dismal days in Dar es Salaam when the only Chinese restaurant in town served those odd stir-fried dishes that were heavier on cabbage and carrots than anything else. Could the cole slaw be stir-fried, I wondered?

Yes.

I began adding it to stir-fried veggies not long after we got the bag home, and went through the whole thing fairly quickly. I'm trying to wean us away from rice and pasta as part of the stir-fry dishes that I have been concocting. The cole slaw serves as a cheap and low-carb filler on the dish. I can't tell that it affects the flavor much, since the shreds are so thin, but the dish is nicely bulked up so that there is no need for the carbs.

The best news for our home economy is that My Prince's aversion to cooked cabbage (it's a digestive thing apparently) seems not to be a factor here. He's digesting nicely, so we will surely continue to use this ingredient (unless I am just dying for some brown rice).