Harvest Monday October 26, 2015

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. Last week I harvested a few new things from the garden and also dealt with past harvests that needed further processing. Before the first freeze came I picked all the pods from the Good Mother Stallard beans and brought them in to dry a bit before shelling. After shelling I weighed the beans and they yielded a bit more than 12 ounces. It’s not a huge yield but we’ll get a couple of meals from them. They are a nice firm bean for soups and I often use them in minestrone or other vegetable soups.

I also harvested all the remaining pods from the tepary beans. Some of them were not completely dry, so I will wait before weighing them up. I’ll do another update on the whole tepary bean experiment once I get the final totals in. That’s the Sacaton Brown variety in the below photo, which is very similar to the brown tepary beans I have bought in the past. When the beans are good and dry I’ll tally up the weight and do a recap on the tepary bean growing experiment. I will say I have been pleased with the results and plan on growing them again next year.

Coming in fresh from the garden were a couple of the Kossak kohlrabi. They’ve done well this fall, and have been averaging around 1.5 pounds each. We most often eat them raw, with a little yogurt-tahini dip.

With rain forecast, I cut two more cabbages to keep them from splitting. It’s one head each of Farao and Parel in the below photo. They weren’t real big, a little over a pound each, but we still had one large head in the refrigerator which meant I needed to get with it and make some cabbage disappear.

I used one of the heads to make a batch of slaw. I found a few of our spring carrots to grate up and the last Red of Tropea onion to add to the cabbage. I tossed the slaw with a vinegar and oil dressing and it made a side dish to some burgers I served up on homemade buns one night for dinner. It’s my wife turn to cook this week and now she has the rest of the cabbage to deal with!

I finished drying up the last of the smoked peppers.  In the below photo the long peppers are Holy Mole while the blocky ones are both green and red Ancho 211. For some reason I usually have a hard time getting ancho peppers to ripen here before frost, and this year was no different. I’ve tried several varieties, but Ancho 211 is my best producer so far. Holy Mole is a hybrid version of the Pasilla Bajio pepper, and it is a great performer here for me.

I use the dried peppers for a number of dishes, but one of my current favorites is making enchiladas. I was never really happy with my homemade ones until I finally found a good recipe for the sauce. It’s my version of one from a book called Gourmet Gringo by Mari Meyers that I picked up on one of our trips to the Southwest. I use our plain, unseasoned tomato sauce along with lots of Homemade Chile Powder and a little bit of minced garlic to make a Red Chile Sauce. This batch of sauce had some of the smoked Holy Mole and NuMex types in it, and I poured it over corn tortillas that were stuffed with refried Rio Zape beans. I added a little crumbled Queso Chihuahua over the top and I had a meal for me plus leftovers for the freezer!

I’ll close with one more pepper I dried, the Feher Ozon paprika pepper. I neglected to photograph any before I dried them, but they are a blocky thick-walled pepper that matures from whitish to yellow to red when fully ripe. I let these get red before harvesting, then split them open and removed the seeds and membrane before dehydrating. They made a lovely paprika powder after grinding, and I will be growing this one again next year.

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to share, add your name and blog link to Mr Linky below. And be sure and check out what everyone is harvesting!