Recipes From The Garden Of Eatin: Aretha Singleton's Exotic Cabbage

Aretha Singleton shows off some of her garden-grown produce. (Photo by Fort Greene Focus)

Welcome to the inaugural recipe of our series: Recipes From The Garden Of Eatin. We’re beginning this with recipes and other food stories from the seniors and residents of Ingersoll House’s award-winning Garden Of Eden.

Aretha Singleton has lived for 38 years in the Ingersoll Houses and has done a lot in her time here, serving as friend as well as community chef through the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project, helping to demonstrate, at street fairs and other community events, how simple it is to cook healthy food for yourself and your family.

“I just love cooking and people. It means so much to me, teaching people to eat healthy. Whatever sickness you have, if you’re not too far gone, can be reversed,” Singleton says. “We don’t eat too healthy. So as a community chef, I would stand there, cook, have a recipe made up and little plates for samples.

“It was like giving a gift to someone. A lot of the time, doctors are not the answer. You need to go back to the basics of your grandmother and mother,” she said.

Here, she shares with us her recipe for “Exotic Cabbage.”

EXOTIC CABBAGE

Ingredients:

1 head of white cabbage
1 pepper each: green, yellow, orange, red
1/2 teaspoon tumeric, ground
1/2 teaspoon Adobo
1 clove, chopped, Garlic
1 pinch of cayenne pepper
Olive oil

Slice everything very thin, lengthwise. Cook everything together in a skillet for about 20 minutes on slow to medium high heat. NO WATER ADDED. Cabbage makes their own water. It doesn’t take cabbage long to cook. You don’t want it mushy.

Serve with potato salad or some fish, although it is also great on its own.