I must admit, yet again, that I haven’t been inspired to cook lately. It’s even gotten to the point where just cooking and eating the same old things doesn’t seem so bad. Ever since the holidays, there’s been too much soup and takeout on the menu for my taste. The reason, however, is slightly different than before: I can’t stop working! I’m this close to finishing my new website and whenever I’m in the coding stages of a website, I just can’t seem to drag myself away from it. I get slightly obsessed with making everything work. So I just keep on working until I’m too hungry and tired and don’t feel like cooking anymore. It sounds crazy, writing it down like this, but sadly it’s the truth. Thank goodness it’ll all be done tomorrow (fingers crossed) or the day after. Speaking of, this blog will be integrated in my new website, so it might look funny or not work at all sometime during the next few days, but it’ll all be fine (I hope!).

But there’s light on the horizon, because this past weekend I felt my passion for food returning ever so slowly. So I sat down with Allerhande, which is the magazine of one of our supermarkets, and made a new menu for this coming week. I also picked out two recipes to make on Sunday and they were both excellent!

salmon marinated in beet juice with a red onion, lemon and parsley vinaigrette
&
stewed cabbage with maple syrup and bacon
&
rye bread with homemade tzatziki

I thought it’d be nice to share last weekend’s dinner this time, for lack of last week’s dinner. Though the salmon was really good – salmon and beet appear to be made for each other – I wanted to share the stewed cabbage because I’m always looking for different ways to serve vegetables and Joop and I both loved it. I used what we call pointed cabbage, which Wikipedia tells me is a pointy version of white cabbage, yet I can’t find the English name. It looks like this; if someone knows the English name, I’d love to hear!

stewed cabbage with maple syrup and bacon:

Cut a (pointed) cabbage into quarters and remove the hard part. Cut the cabbage into strips. Heat 10 grams butter in a pan, add 50 ml water and 50 grams maple syrup. Add the cabbage, stir and simmer, covered, for about 30 min. Take the lid of the pan, turn the heat up to high and let all the moisture evaporate, stirring occasionally. In the meantime, fry about 100 grams bacon till nice and crispy. Add to the cabbage and serve immediately.

Enjoy! // (adapted from Allerhande recipe “gesmoorde spitskool“)