Curried Cabbage with Vegan Feta

I've had some good luck with recipes lately but haven't felt like blogging. Maybe it's because I know I'm not good at the photography aspect of it and am not interested in getting better. I think it's useful for me to know I don't have to be good at everything, and photography really doesn't interest me. Besides, everyone takes pictures of everything these days, so I can usually get someone else's. But writing and cooking are amongst my favorite things, so I keep cooking and jotting down notes, and then nothing gets blogged.

I made curried cabbage with vegan feta a couple weeks ago and enjoyed dissecting with my sister what cultures were represented in the dish. (Another thing I like doing, besides cooking, is having What's App conversations with my sisters.) She told me that Indians do not use curry (they use spices, as we all know, but not curry, which I'd never noticed), so that aspect of it is more Thai. But Thai cooks would never stick breadcrumbs on a dish and bake it. That made me kind of happy, because it meant I'd invented a fusion food.

I feel creatively successful also because this dish was not just a modification of an existing recipe. I had half a cabbage left from my CSA and felt for some reason it ought to be curried. I guess because all the cabbage recipes I normally make have such subtle understated flavors, using colorless things like garlic and white wine, and I wanted this to be different. It was hard to find a curried cabbage recipe, though, so I ended up combining ideas from different recipes I found online.

I added the vegan feta because I'm always looking for ways to add protein to my meals, and I know cabbage is good with feta. The recipe is from John Schlimm's The Cheesy Vegan, but I left out some of his spices because they didn't go with the curry.

Feta Ingredients

1 block of extra firm tofu, pressed
3 tsp miso paste
1/4 cup red wine
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt (I'd use more salt if this wasn't going in a curry, but the curry also has salt)
2 Tbsp nutritional yeast

(you won't use all the feta in the recipe)

Curry Ingredients

1/2 a shallot
1 clove garlic
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp mustard seed
1/2 tsp turmeric
dash of cayenne
1 tsp curry powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 head of cabbage, chopped

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

To make the tofu, crumble the drained tofu into chunks with your hands. In a separate bowl, mix the miso, wine, lemon juice, and salt together. Pour over the tofu. Mix with your hands if the tofu is still in large pieces. If it's already crumbled well, just stir gently. You want the tofu to stay lumpy. Let sit for 10 minutes. Then sprinkle the nutritional yeast on top and stir. Leave in fridge.


Mince the shallot and garlic and sautee in the olive oil on low heat until translucent. Turn the heat up to medium and add remaining spices. Add the cabbage. Stir occasionally and cook until soft and translucent as well.

Spray a baking dish and heat the oven to 350. Pour the spiced cabbage into the dish, add 1/2 cup feta and mix together gently. Smooth out the top and sprinkle breadcrumbs on top. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until breadcrumbs start to toast.

This made me only 2 servings because my cabbage was small. It should make 3 or 4 with a regular-sized cabbage.