What Do You Do With a Head of Red Cabbage?

If it were left entirely up to me, my family's diet would be far less healthy. Lots of butter, lots of coconut milk, unlimited quantities of cheese - if I were a single girl, my cuisine might have ultimately devolved into me, sitting on the couch in my sweats with a whole stick of butter in my hand and chomping on it like a peeled banana. Caleb is a healthful influence, but sometimes he'll bring a so-called Superfood into the house without any overall design as to how it's going to fit into our shambles of a family meal plan. Recently, an entire head of red cabbage appeared in our fridge, and there it has sat, waiting for me to transmogrify it into a Dish. Hence the salad you see in its pre-assembled components: vinaigrette and Braeburn apples, shredded red cabbage with some very un-appetizing-looking dried cherries, and the spiced candied pecans I MADE MYSELF while buzzing from a big Starbucks latte, which is the unbilled ingredient in nearly every meal I make. The pecans were absurdly easy to make and smelled up the kitchen in a good way - brown sugar, cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce which sadly makes this a not-strictly-vegetarian recipe. The salad is meant to contain equal parts red and Napa cabbage but the overall raison d'etre here is to lay waste to an entire head of the red stuff, so the Napa has been benched. The kids will hate this recipe, I have little doubt, but it will probably add a good week or so to the lives of those of us who eat it.