A jar of red cabbage and bacon chops.

So the other day David got carried away with bargains again and insisted on buying this jar of red cabbage in Aldi. I tried to stop him even though, like him, I thought it was a red cabbage sauerkraut kind of thing. And as usual I caved. But it wasn't even fermented red cabbage - just red cabbage, supposedly with apple. Anyway he wanted it for his special dinner, and coincidentally in the same shopping expedition I noticed something called bacon chops which I had never heard of before, and so I bought them, thinking they would go well with the red cabbage. Because he had already told me he wanted it for his special meal.

Yesterday was the day that I had to put it all together and so I searched the net for things to do with (a) jars of red cabbage, and (b) bacon chops. And this is what I found.

An excellent recipe from a lady calling herself the Kitchen Maus. She specialises in German food and what she was aiming at here was a dish called blaukraut. And here's an interesting fact about red cabbage - which as she so rightly says is mostly purple.

"It comes down to the PH in the soil. The more acidic the soil, the more red the cabbage will be and vice versa with more alkaline soils and it turning more blue in colour."

Anyway you can find her recipe here. It involved adding some apple, red wine vinegar redcurrant jelly (she suggested lingonberry) and juniper berries. And it did turn out to be pretty good. So first problem solved. Well almost - I do, of course, have some left over, so I shall have to think of something to do with it.

As to the bacon chops - they seem to be quite a big thing in England, but honestly I have never seen them here. I'm not sure whether it isn't just another name for ham steaks - I honestly think that sometimes there is not a real lot of difference between bacon and ham here in Australia. Bacon is just not bacon to me - and why can't we get those gorgeous gammon joints that you can get in England? Or am I just being stupid?

Well I found a bit of a diatribe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on supermarket bacon which rather rang a bell with me:

"Introduce limp, insipid, Elastoplast-pink rashers to heat, and after a few minutes your frying pan resembles nothing so much as a stagnant pond of fat, salty liquid and sinister, white goo." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

I don't know that my efforts are quite as bad as that, but I certainly never seem to be able to get them all crispy and curly. So River Cottage to the rescue in the form of a recipe for curing your own pork chops and changing them into bacon chops. Simple and an overnight process. I might try it some time. He says you can also do it with pork belly though this would take 48 hours. Then I guess you might have bacon. Click here for the recipe.

But I didn't do this - well I had the supermarket version which I have no doubt Fearnley-Whittingstall would deplore, and I had found a recipe from Nigel Slater for Bacon Chops Cabbage and Apple. The cabbage he used was green and he was cooking it for scratch so I just substituted my red cabbage instead. The picture was a bit misleading though.

I'm not sure what those chunks are in the picture - the apple? And maybe that's cabbage underneath, but you can't really tell and anyway he tells you to nestle the chops in the cabbage and cook them in the oven. The picture almost led me to disaster as I thought it was just a recipe for frying the bacon chops with a very interesting marinade - that's why I chose the recipe - and serving with the cabbage as a side. So I cooked the cabbage, waited a while and then started on the chops, only to discover they had to be 'nestled' into the cabbage and cooked in the oven for 20 minutes. But red cabbage is forgiving and so was David who thought his dinner was ready. And it all turned out pretty well in the end. Though because of the nestling the chops had rather lost the flavour of the marinade and taken on the flavour of the cabbage - which was nicely sweet and sour.

So a sort of success. I have a recipe for fermented red cabbage with beetroot that I aim to try some time. It was in one of Donna Hay's magazines. Next time I see some red cabbage at a reasonable price - which won't be until winter. It's certainly not a summer vegetable. You can get it but it's expensive. I absolutely won't be buying a jar again though. There are so many recipes for other interesting things to do with real red cabbage out there.