I think it is safe to say my wife and I have gotten our fill of turkey for a while. Last week I picked up a fresh local turkey from Uebelhack Turkey Farm that weighed almost 18 pounds. I baked it for Thanksgiving, and we’ve pretty much been eating on it ever since!
Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes
It was just the two of us celebrating Thanksgiving, but we tried to do it in style. In addition to the Big Bird we had Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes and cooked up some frozen Derby green beans for side dishes. We used our Beauregard sweet potatoes for roasting. I know folks (some of them relatives) that won’t eat a sweet potato unless it is swimming in butter and loaded with sugar and marshmallows, but thankfully my wife and I agree that simple is better when it comes to most vegetables, including sweet potatoes.
pumpkin pie
My wife baked one of her yummy pumpkin pies for dessert, using our frozen Canada Crookneck Squash puree. It was the best tasting squash in our recent Pumpkin Smackdown, and I need to do another tasting of the remaining varieties soon. It was great in the pie.
taco salad using leftover turkey
We had leftovers of all the above on Friday. Saturday we took part of the turkey meat along with some frozen tomato sauce and made Turkey Chipotle Taco and Burrito Filling. Some of that went into a taco salad for dinner, and the rest went into the freezer for later meals. We made broth with the bones, and froze the broth along with meat for soups. We will be enjoying this turkey for some time to come! The lettuce for the taco salad was some of the Spotted Trout that I harvested a couple of weeks ago.
Coalition Mix Kale
I did harvest some of the Coalition Kale Mix last week. My wife cooked it up for a side dish. I love this mix, and I will be growing it again for sure. I have no idea how winter hardy it will be in our area, but it has made it so far.
large kale leaf
Though it’s a mix of quite a few different kales, several of the plants I wound up with this year have huge, flat leaves that almost resemble collard greens. The taste is all kale though, and after a few frosts it got even better.
harvest of turnips
I also pulled a few turnips yesterday, which I plan on cooking up tonight. The white ones are Hakurei and the long purple ones are an Italian heirloom variety called Mezza Lunga Bianca Colletto Viola. We had the greens from the turnips last night, along with a grilled turkey sandwich.
Cream of Asparagus Soup
Though we both worked on the Thanksgiving meal (and its aftermath), it was my wife’s turn to cook last week. She used some of our 2014 frozen asparagus to make a batch of Cream of Asparagus Soup. Despite the name, there is no cream or milk in the soup, and only a little bit of butter. It is mainly asparagus cooked in chicken broth, then pureed until nice and smooth. It was a great change of pace after our turkey-thon! My wife stirred in a bit of plain yogurt in hers, but I sprinkled on a little bit of my smoked paprika, which gave it another nice layer of flavor, not to mention a bit of color.
Dark Rye Potato Rolls
Since the soup was the main (and only) attraction for the meal that night, I volunteered to make some rolls to go with it. I made a batch of my Dark Rye Potato Rolls, which gave me another chance to tweak the recipe a bit. I will share it here once I get it worked out to my satisfaction.
chipotle peppers
Last week I used a few of the smoked jalapenos to grind up for chipotle powder. And let me say it was h-o-t. I was sneezing and coughing while grinding them in the spice grinder, and that was before I took the lid off! I love the flavor of them, but they are so hot I may have to tame them down a bit by adding some of the milder smoked peppers. I think I may try growing TAM jalapeno next year. I’ve grown it before, and it is a milder jalapeno that registers about 1000 on the Scoville scale. That’s still plenty hot for me, but less so than the El Jefe variety I grew this year. It is an o/p variety developed by Texas A&M University, hence the name TAM.
That’s a look at what’s happening here at HA. To see what others are harvesting and cooking up, visit Daphne’s Dandelions where Daphne hosts Harvest Mondays. I’ll be back later this week with a review of how my smoked pepper project turned out.
I’m with you on the marshmallow sweet potato thing – just don’t understand it. I like the look of those Italian turnips; I must include turnips (and asparagus!) in my grow list for next year. Even with the new beds, I am still constantly thinking “where can I squeeze that in”.
I was planting asparagus here before we even had the moving boxes unpacked! I almost always grow the humble turnip here in fall. It’s so easy, I know people that just throw the seed out on the garden and it grows. It’s also pretty hardy, and doesn’t mind being frozen a few times. Or in our case, it got snowed on already this year!
I’m laughing, because we’ve got the turkeython going here too. It’s comforting to know that there’s another crazy couple cooking up a LARGE bird – we ended up with a 21 pounder for the two of us. But now I’ve got quarts of turkey stock in the freezer a big batch of turkey soup in the fridge and plans for turkey enchiladas and turkey lettuce cups this week. I’m with you about keeping veggie preparations simple, with good home grown veggies there’s no need to doctor them up. I’m going to have to try one of those kale mixes. I actually got seeds for one and haven’t gotten around to growing it.
I think if you’re going to have the oven going to bake a turkey, you might as well bake a big one! And there’s nothing like turkey broth for soup. Turkey lettuce cups makes me think of fixing turkey lettuce wraps. It’s a versatile bird for sure!
Interesting turnips. I have never seen long purple ones. We had a 15 lb turkey and six guests, but we are still eating turkey too. For our meal, we used home-grown onions, lemons, and herbs. LOVE Thanksgiving, especially when at least some of it is home-grown.
I always hated those awful sweet potato marshmallow things. Our Thanksgiving is kind of weird. Colors are given out. The person with orange was invited over here to pick out sweet potatoes, squash, and carrots for Thanksgiving as I had so many of them. Luckily she made the sweet potatoes very plain. Roasted with rosemary. Yummy. Sadly I don’t get leftover turkey though. There were 45 people in attendance. You don’t get a lot of leftovers that way. Well turkey leftovers at any rate. But I do make roast turkey on a regular basis. I buy a small half turkey though. It cooks fast and doesn’t have so much left over. I swear I do it for the turkey broth. I like turkey broth better than chicken broth.
I grew TAM jalapenos this year and I didn’t think they were going to be too hot, but to me they seemed hotter than the cayenne peppers I usually grow – and they are much higher on the Scoville scale!
I remember the TAM peppers being variable in heat when I grew them. But I figure, at least there’s a chance I will get a milder one, and with the ones I grow now they are uniformly and consistently HOT!