Month: September 2025

The Weekly Feast – Cabbage and Beef Soup

Happy September!!!

We’re doing our best to eat healthy around here, but we also want food that tastes good. I love soup (hubby not so much, but oh well), and with the cooler weather arriving, I plan on making a lot of soups. You can pack a ton of flavor into soup that is almost calorie free, where making the “regular” version of it would blow your diet to smithereens. So soup, here I come! This one tastes sort of like the innards of a lasagna, honestly.

Ingredients:

  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 large onion (finely chopped)
  • 2 cloves garlic (minced)
  • 1 lb lean ground beef
  • Salt and black pepper (to taste)
  • 14 oz can chopped tomatoes
  • 6 cups shredded cabbage
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 1 tsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp onion powder
  • ½ tsp oregano
  • ½ tsp thyme
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 5 cups beef broth
  • Parsley (chopped)

Pre-heat a soup pot to medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Add in the chopped onion and cook for 2-3 minutes until they have slightly softened. Add in the garlic and let it cook for about 30 seconds, or until fragrant. then, add the ground beef, salt, and black pepper. Cook for 7-8 minutes, breaking the meat apart with a spatula.

Add in the chopped tomatoes, shredded cabbage, paprika, garlic, onion powder, oregano, thyme and bay leaf. Mix it all together very well. Pour in the beef broth, stir it, and let it simmer for 25 minutes or so until the cabbage fully cooks. A little longer is okay, as this stuff only tastes better as time goes on.

Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Garnish with parsley before serving.

Notes:

I put shredded cheese on the table to add some fat, because this soup does NOT have a lot of it. I did drain the ground beef before moving on with the recipe. You could add a dollop of cream cheese to this, or some spicy peppers, and it would still be good. If you switched out the tomatoes for one of those 14 oz cans of tomatoes and green chilies you can get in the Mexican aisle, then topped it with tortilla strips, you’d have Mexican tortilla soup. All I know is this stuff was delish, a huge bowl of it is only about 300 calories (if made as written), and maybe not even that much.

A hand holds a checklist labeled PLAN against a bright blue background, surrounded by colorful gears, symbolizing the importance of planning in projects.

Too Many Projects

The project list keeps growing.

  • Mud the hallway so the wife can paint it after it’s been stripped to the drywall (and then some).
  • Finish building the joiner’s chest. This has subprojects:
    • Finish planing the first end to thickness and avoid knots in the future.
    • Sharpen the plane irons for the new planes
    • Finish smoothing and jointing the boards on hand to create the top, front, back, and other side.
      • Repair the broken saw handle.
      • Take the handle off the saw panel.
      • Clean the saw panel.
      • Sharpen the saw.
      • Preserve the saw.
      • Reattach the handle.
      • Repeat for the crosscut saw.
    • Get the rest of the lumber needed
    • Finish the required sides and top.
    • Smooth and plane to thickness the bottom boards.
    • Rabbet the bottom boards (learn how to cut nice rabbets.
  • Fill the joiner’s chest in an organized way.
  • Build a new 6 board chest for Ally to use in reenacting.
  • Build a couple of stools.
  • Create a new nut and screw for the leg vise at the Fort.
  • Install and configure a new Ceph node to replace an existing node.
  • Upgrade the Ceph cluster.
  • Build, populate, and configure a new Ceph server.
  • Make the new “managed” switch do switching stuff.
  • Move the current switch from the internal net to the DMZ
  • Loose more weight
  • Exercise more.

 

Boring, but it just keeps growing, and after my wife reads it, I expect her to add to it.