Harvest Monday November 30, 2015

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. Cooking this week seemed to revolve around something other than vegetables. On Monday we got a fresh, pastured turkey from a local producer (Uebelhack Turkey Farm). The bird wound up weighing a little over 17 pounds, which is a lot of turkey for the two of us! That’s all part of the plan though, and we wound up baking it Wednesday and starting our Thanksgiving turkey-thon a day early. It was a joint effort, with me baking the turkey and my wife making side dishes of mashed potatoes and braised kale. I harvested about a pound of White Russian kale for the occasion, and it was tender and sweet after cooking up.

We don’t eat pie very often, but it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving for either of us without a pumpkin pie. My wife makes a great one, using her grandmother’s recipe that calls for a touch of whiskey in the filling. For this pie she used pureed Canada Crookneck winter squash, which won our pumpkin smackdown last year. It’s great tasting but a shy producer here for me, so we saved it for a special occasion like this pie! You can find her recipe here on her blog.

We wound up eating on the turkey for six meals, and filling up the freezer with turkey related stuff for future meals. We used the meat to make a double batch of my Chicken Chipotle Taco and Burrito Filling. We ate turkey taco salad for one meal and froze the rest for later. The next day we had turkey reuben sandwiches on homemade rye bread using our homemade cabbage sauerkraut. After that we got the remaining meat off the bones and used them to make turkey broth, which I slow simmered for several hours. We used the broth to make turkey soup, which we ate on for two meals. My wife used some of the meat to make a turkey pot pie which she stuck in the freezer, and we put the rest of the meat with the broth and froze it.

After all that turkey, we were ready for something completely different! It came in the form of some scallop tacos my wife made, served up with sweet potato fries. For the fries we included all three sweet potato varieties I grew this year. We wanted to compare the white fleshed newcomer Bonita along with the tried and true Purple and Beauregard. My wife cut the sweet potatoes into thick slabs, tossed them with olive oil and baked them in a 450°F oven until brown and crispy. I think all three were tasty prepared this way. Bonita is a keeper, and I look forward to more experimenting with it in the kitchen. On the plate in the photo below, from left to right we have Bonita, Beauregard, and Purple.

Another small harvest came in the form of greens for a frittata. I cut leaves of Speedy arugula and Mizspoona that are growing in the greenhouse. I need to do another greenhouse tour to show the assortment of winter greens I have growing there. Mizspoona is a cross between mizuna and tatsoi, though to me it looks more like a big-leaf mizuna.

The last harvest of the week came in the form of some small kohlrabies I pulled from one of the cold frame beds. These suffered an early setback when some critter munched on them shortly after planting. Some recovered and went on to produce, but most in that bed didn’t. The five kohlrabies in the below photo weighed just 12 ounces total, but they will be edible all the same. I grated up one of the purple ones for slaw, adding it to the last of the fall cabbage.

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!