Harvest Monday November 16, 2015

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. Back in August I planted Speedy and Apollo arugula in one of the cold frame beds. Both of these are fairly mild tasting, as arugula goes, and now that the weather is colder I think the taste has gotten even better. I made a cutting of Apollo last week which you can see in the below photo. The leaves are large and rounded, and these wound up in a batch of pesto I made. I have come to enjoy the taste of arugula, and I think it makes a wonderful pesto.

For this batch of pesto I used olive oil, walnuts, arugula, garlic and a dash of salt. After planting garlic I always have a lot of partial bulbs and single cloves left. I plan on using some of these in a skillet chicken dish later in the week.  As much as we use garlic in the kitchen they won’t be around long! They were all harvested back in July and August and so far have been keeping well, including ones that aren’t necessarily good keepers like the Turban types.

We continue to enjoy the turnips and greens. I pulled several Hakurei turnips for a dish I made called Sweet Potato & Turnip Mash with Sage Butter. Cooked turnips and sweet potatoes are mashed and mixed up with a browned sage butter. For the sweet potato I used one of the larger Beauregards that had cracking and scurf on the skin. I think it qualifies as ‘wonky’, don’t you? But there was nothing wrong with it at all after peeling away the surface blemishes. I plucked a few sage leaves from a plant I started from seed (Renee’s Italian Aromatic Sage) for the sage butter. Next time I think I will try roasting the veggies before mashing instead of cooking in water like the recipe specifies.

The turnip and sweet potato mash made a tasty side dish for some salmon cakes I cooked up for dinner one night. I topped the salmon with the arugula pesto I made from the Apollo arugula. I have to say I really enjoy eating a dinner where I knew all of the veggies personally!

With another hard freeze predicted last week, I decided to harvest the remaining cabbage and kohlrabies. In the below photo you can see the flathead KY Cross cabbage along with Kolibri and Winner kohlrabi. There’s also a few tiny broccoli side shoots, the only ones my plants have made this fall. This wasn’t one of my better years for broccoli, though I don’t know exactly why. There’s always next year though! At least the other brassicas have done nicely, especially this fall.

I used some of the cabbage and kohlrabi to make slaw. I grated up the purple Kolibri kohlrabi skin and all to add a little color. The slaw was paired up with some burgers I grilled one night for dinner. I liked the purple kohlrabi in there and I will be doing that again when I have another Kolibri. I sometimes make slaw with kohlrabi alone, but I like a mixed slaw with cabbage in there too. This one was about 1/3 kohlrabi, though it’s hard to tell from the photo.

A small harvest came in the form of a couple of green cayenne peppers I plucked from a container plant I’ve been keeping in the greenhouse. These are from Cayennetta, a great pepper for growing in a container. One plant always gives me loads of peppers. I used them to make a batch of hot seasoned vinegar I like to keep in the refrigerator for adding to cooked greens, especially turnip greens.

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!