Spicy Cabbage and Beef Soup

Ground beef browned and cooked with cabbage, celery, carrot, pepper and fire-roasted tomatoes with green chillies. No country is claimed. It is a template rather than a fixed recipe, and the source is unusually good about saying so. It gives instructions for making it hotter, milder, thinner, thicker, vegetarian, or with pork chops or chicken instead of beef, and it points out that it doubles and triples well for batch cooking. That flexibility is genuinely the most useful thing about it. The technique worth noting is browning the beef first and using its rendered fat to cook the vegetables. That fat carries flavour, and pouring it all away, as many recipes instruct, throws it out. The source has you drain only the excess and cook the onions and peppers in what remains, which is right. Two inconsistencies. The method calls for garlic and beef broth; the ingredient list contains neither, offering vegetable or chicken stock and granulated garlic powder instead. Both have been reconciled below. Fire-roasted tomatoes with green chillies are doing a lot of the work here, they carry smoke, acidity and heat in one tin, and plain tomatoes will need chilli added separately.