Rosemary and the Giant Cabbage

I didn't know what I was asking for when I asked Miranda to get me a couple of cabbages on her weekly grocery market trip. I've felt like making cabbage soup because it's so chilly and gloomy.

She called me Monday morning and asked me to come down and help her carry the cabbages up the 78 stairs to the office. What?

These babies were huge, like bowling balls and almost as heavy. They know how to grow cabbages here in the Balkans!

They've been doing it for eons -- cabbage being crammed with vitamin C plus easily pickled or cooked and preserved for use during long winters. As you drive along roads in the country here or in Kosovo or anyplace you see these giant green orbs in the fields. Split them open -- and this took the biggest knife I could find -- and they are gorgeous firm and white. I could take a portrait.

But instead I found a slew of cabbage recipes on line. I've had curried cabbage and cabbage soup so far -- and that only used up a half a head.

Until this experience I had thought it kind of silly that the city of Bijeljina is planning to erect a monument to a vegetable. But now, I'm a believer and next November I will have to go to this town on the Serbian border for Cabbage-Fest to see the new statue. At the very least this will make an entry into the Stupid Tourist Attractions log Jennifer and I have been compiling over the past decade.