Albert Heijn’s Vegetable Garden: Fear of Pointed Cabbage and Radioactive Buckwheat
If you can no longer stand the sight of sun salutations or jigsaw puzzles, if you can sing along to all of Netflix’s intros and even baking sourdough bread can’t dispel your boredom, there’s one last salvation: Albert Heijn’s vegetable gardens. The supermarket giant read the mood perfectly when they launched the promotion again last week, with those highly coveted little pots containing seeds, coconut fibre and peat pots. Only: why do I keep getting pointed cabbage?
The vegetable gardens are different from previous years. This time, we’re collecting vegetable-garden buddies. Each vegetable plant goes hand in hand with an herb or a flower that benefits from it, and vice versa, just as true friends do. The packaging doesn’t reveal on the outside which buddy duo the cashier will give you, so only once you’re home – and the caramel ice cream is safely in the freezer, the cold cuts in the fridge, the cat food in the storage tin and why is this taking so long – can you see what your harvest will be in a few months.
With dill
Off comes package one: well, how nice, pointed cabbage with dill. Package two: pointed cabbage. With dill. And package three: pointed cabbage with dill. Good grief, did we buy a year’s supply of washing powder and blocks of cheese and new toothpaste just to push that bill up to vegetable-garden levels? Package four: dill and pointed cabbage. Luckily, package five promises buckwheat and radishes, but six and seven are our regular customers again: pointed cabbage and dill.
Looks like bean sprouts, but different
So now there’s a pointed-cabbage field on the kitchen counter. A little watering every day, keeping a close eye on things, and sure enough, after week one the first cabbages poke their heads above the soil. Well, heads, they’re still thin, spindly shoots and look a lot like bean sprouts, but it’s working, they’re growing and things are happening.
The company Ahold probably managed to buy the buckwheat seeds at favourable terms in Chernobyl or Fukushima, because they shoot up into the air and have already produced three-centimetre-long stems in just a few days, but the cabbage is steadily following suit. A few more weeks, the packaging says, and the cabbage can go into the garden.
Deep-fried
Anyone have tips for something tasty with pointed cabbage? Because I’m anticipating a huge harvest, and on our site I can only find recipes for cauliflower, red cabbage and (deep-fried) kale, but nothing with pointed cabbage. I only know pointed cabbage from bags of stir-fry vegetables – and that’s not exactly an endorsement of vegetables in general or pointed cabbage in particular.
Who wants to trade for buckwheat stems that glow in the dark?
