This evening we dined on some homemade cabbage tomato soup, which was a riff off the “Cabbage Roll Soup” recipe from Dinner at the Zoo. It’s quite similar to the full recipe I wrote up in May 2022 before leaving Oklahoma City, for “Beef Cabbage Soup,” except this version leaves out the green peppers and minced garlic. This was a perfect meal for a cool, rainy, winter evening in North Carolina. Here’s a cooking log post documenting and sharing my ingredients and cooking steps.
I cooked this in the crock pot all day on low, and just added the chopped cabbage leaves in the last hour when I turned up the crock pot temperature to high. If you cook cabbage leaves too long in a crock pot or soup pot on the stove, they get too soft and disintegrate, which isn’t ideal.
Rather than ground beef, I cooked this dish with some sirloin / beef tips from Butcher Box. Butcher Box is a mail order, subscription high quality meat delivery service that we like a lot and have used for several years now. Here’s my referral link if you want to check it out. I chopped up the beef tips into smaller pieces and seasoned with some Kinder’s “The Blend Seasoning,” which I picked up at Costco earlier this fall. I just did this in the morning, before cooking them, but the meat would have tasted even better if I let the seasoning “set up” overnight in the fridge, like I often do now with steaks. (A “dry brine”.)
I chopped up an onion and sautéed it in the skillet, adding some chopped celery and the chopped sirloin tips. I made the base of the soup in the crock pot directly by combining 16 oz of beef broth (organic from Trader Joe’s), a can of tomato sauce, and two cans of Hunts Fire Roasted Tomatoes. (I LOVE cooking with those! They are the BEST in chili too!) I also added some chopped baby carrots.
After the onion / celery / beef tips mix was sautéed and browned, I added that to the crock pot. I added a some Traeger rub seasoning and a bit of siracha sauce for spice. I didn’t have any Worcestershire sauce, so I added about a tablespoon of a mysterious vinegar-based seasoning bottle I think someone gave me at school, or maybe our neighbor did. I was feeling adventurous!
My last ingredient was a little rice. I added what we had left in a bag, which was about two-thirds of a cup, and stirred everything up well.
I let this concoction cook all day in the crock pot while we were at school, and about 4:30 pm added some cabbage. I cut the cabbage leaves in fourths, not too tiny but also not too big. After cooking on HIGH in the crock pot for an hour, our dinner was ready!
Overall this recipe turned out delicious! This soup had one of the “richest bases” of any soup I’ve cooked previously. I will definitely cook this again, maybe even for guests!
