How do you feel about violently lilac colored soup?

Because if you aren't down with it, I suggest using green cabbage rather than red cabbage in the recipe below.

As per usual, there are days when I just can't be bothered to plan far in advance what we'll have for dinner. I then call and beg my husband to come up with something. Most of the time he comes through. He buys frozen pizza. Or he makes pasta with pesto. Sometimes the thought of having pasta with pesto will bestir me to great lengths of invention in order to provide myself with ANYTHING other than pasta with pesto.

Last night, after I told him with no uncertain words that I will not be dining on pasta and pesto and that I deserved something a bit nicer than that, seeing how I'd done cleaned the stairwell and given myself an allergy attack because of it. Somehow this still morphed into *me* making Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup... probably because my husband noticed that the half a head of cabbage was beginning to grow a beautiful cabbage flower from it's butt. And then he ran out the door to buy buns. We never have buns or yogurt, we always seem to be "just out". I'm convinced there is an evil gnome living in my home who eats yogurt on buns when I'm at Danish class.

Anyway, I discovered that it will take an hour to boil the soup, let alone all the other bits that have to go into it. And it was already 9 o'clock. I didn't want to wait THAT long for dinner. I tried to reach the Danish Boy while he was still at the store, but he'd gone and left his phone on silent, the bugger.

So, to the internet I turned. Somewhere there must be a faster food that I can prepare.

Bless Allrecipes.com - they have an ingredients search feature and after plugging some random stuff into it, a recipe came out the other side. I modified it a bit, because I had more stuff that I wanted to get rid of, but it turned out to be a damn tasty soup. It's also crazy cheap if you happen to have loads of left over cream and half a head of cabbage growing in your 'fridge.

Archaeogoddess's Creamy Cabbage Soup
Ingredients
2 cups chicken broth (1/2 liter water and a cube of chicken bouillon)
1 onion, diced
4-6 cups of thinly sliced cabbage (that's half a head of red cabbage in Denmark, which are larger than *my* head) (DON'T USE RED CABBAGE IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE PURPLE SOUP, USE GREEN or WHITE or whatever other colors cabbage come in)
1 carrot, diced
2 sticks of celery, cut like you normally cut celery... you know what I mean (this is optional, I had celery that I needed to use up)
1/4 cup butter (60g)
3 tbsp flour
2 cups milk
1 cup whipping cream (OR 2 cups light cream and 1 cup milk, which is what the recipe originally called for, but I had a lot of milk and a good 250 ml of whipping cream left over from husband's birthday "lagkage")
no more than 2 cups of your husband's pork lunch meat (Okay, the recipe calls for 2 cups of cooked ham... but I didn't have any and if aforementioned husband doesn't answer the phone, aforesaid husband will just have to do without his lunch meat)
1 1/2 tsp salt OR salt to taste (since the amount of salt in your bouillon and packaged ham will vary)
1/4 tsp pepper OR to taste
1/2 tsp thyme
chopped fresh parsley as a garnish (also really good if you totally forget the part where it says "garnish" and instead toss the lot in as you are seasoning)

Instructions
1) Simmer veg in the broth for 20 minutes. NOTE: there will be way more veg than liquid when you first put it on the stove. That's okay, just stir it from time to time during the first 5-10 minutes and the liquid will come out of the veg and you'll be fine.
2) In a fairly large saucepan, melt the butter. Stir in the flour. Don't bother trying to make a roux, this is not one of those kinds of soup. If you have no idea what a roux is, don't worry, it's not important at this time.
3) In your hot flour and butter mess, pour the milk and cream. Cook and stir until it thickens a bit.
4) Pour this creamy mess into your veggie mixture (it might smell a bit odd, boiled cabbage and celery will do that, it's okay, you just have to trust me). Add ham, salt, pepper, and thyme. Heat thought. (Uh, that's kind of a stupid thing to say, seeing as how everything is already hot, but what you're doing is getting the tastes to infuse and interact, so make a big show of stirring and tasting for me, okay?) Garnish with parsley.

I took a picture of this violently lilac colored soup, but without the cables I can't get the photo on the computer. I tried. I held the camera close to the computer and asked the file to jump, but I guess it's scared of heights.