So Ross and I worked on the red cabbage kraut as he had hoped yesterday evening. Ross had grown several heads of red cabbage in the garden and had been looking forward to mashing the cabbage this time- or so he says. Unfortunately poor Ross has gotten poison ivy all over his fingers; he just has to look at a poison ivy plant to get it. He looks like a mini-mummy right now with his fingers wrapped up in Band-Aids. Of course this made it impossible for him to mash the cabbage so he was left to weighing and shredding. This left the job of mashing to me-oh joy!
Mashing is a simple process. You just keep pushing down on the cabbage with your knuckles to get the cells of the cabbage to release its moisture. I am amazed at how much fluid gets released. I used a mixture of knuckle mashing and squeezing in my fist as I worked the shredded cabbage. The squeezing helped a bunch, but my knuckles are still so sore today from all the mashing. Cabbage is a really tough vegetable! This batch was red cabbage so the released fluid was a deep purple. The fluid lent my hand a wonderful hue (not to mention smell) as you can see in the picture. All I can say is that doing this gives me a great appreciation for our ancestors. Food preserving and processing was a tough chore, and they did it in much greater quantity than us.
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