Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. Our harvests here are still small in size but much appreciated in the winter season. I cut some spinach and arugula from the greenhouse last week to go on a pizza. The arugula is bolting, so it wound up being more spinach than arugula, but that’s okay since we like both of them on pizza.
spinach and arugula for pizza
The pizza also featured some of our dehydrated tomatoes and pickled peppers, along with bacon and mushrooms. For sauce we mixed olive oil with some minced garlic (German Red) and brushed that on the crust. I used a crust I had made a few weeks ago from White Sonoran wheat and then frozen. I need to share the crust recipe the next time I make it, as it is an easy to make whole wheat crust. I precook the crust for about four minutes or so before freezing. After thawing, we assemble the ingredients then it goes onto a really hot pizza stone for another five or six minutes and it’s done.
pizza with fresh greens
For another meal, I cooked up our 2015 harvest of Good Mother Stallard beans. There was a little under a pound of the dried beans, and I soaked them for several hours before cooking. These pole beans have been a good performer for us, though last year was not a great year for any of the beans.
Good Mother Stallard beans
I cooked the beans for my wife to use in a batch of Pasta e Fagioli. Some of our frozen tomatoes also went in the soup, along with our garlic.
Pasta e Fagioli
One other homegrown and homemade food we enjoyed last week was sauerkraut. We had some as a side dish with salmon burgers my wife cooked for lunch one day. The kraut was a mix of those I made last fall from cabbage, kohlrabi and turnips. We ate it uncooked, and it was still crunchy and tasty after several months in the refrigerator. I’ve said it before, but if I knew how easy it was to ferment vegetables I would have been doing it years ago!
homemade sauerkraut
And while I’m on that meal, the salmon burgers were served up on homemade Dark Rye Potato Buns that were slathered up with a pepper aioli sauce I made using our pickled peppers. The aioli is made using the peppers, mayo and a bit of fresh garlic. I wish I could say the mayo was homemade but it came from a jar. The peppers were a mix of Malawi Piquante and Kaleidoscope, both mildly hot baccatum peppers I grew last year. They add a little zip to the aioli, just like they did to the above mentioned pizza.
red pepper aioli sauce on bun
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!
That’s fantastic that your spinach and arugula are doing so well in the greenhouse. Your pizza and pasta soup look delicious.
I have to admit there were a few seed purchases I made this year because of your suggestions like Sun Gold tomatoes, Hakurei and Tsugaru turnips, and Kolibri kohrabi. I love all the information gardeners share on their blogs.
I get a lot of good ideas from other bloggers too! It is always fun and informative to see what others are growing.
Definitely going to give fermented vegetables a try this year.
Looking forward to your pizza crust recipe and a great idea to prebake the crust before freezing.
Fermented vegetables seem to be all the rage at the moment, but I have to say that I am not fond of them. It’s nice to see ways of preserving your harvests that don’t involve the use of electricity though!
That aioli sounds great – I haven’t made it in a very long time as we don’t have ready access to pasteurized eggs (I’m a bit paranoid in that regard) and I just never thought of using regular mayo as the base. Sometimes things only seem obvious once someone says them!
Partially baking the crust is such a fantastic idea – I would never have thought to do that either. I don’t often make homemade pizza for dinner as it is rather time consuming, specifically because of the crust – I will definitely give this a go!
After I pre-bake the crust I wrap it up tightly in foil before freezing. And after cooking the frozen crust on the pizza stone, I can’t tell the difference between it and the freshly made one. It sure saves time when you don’t have to make the crust first!
I join the chorus of others this morning commenting on the fermented vegetables. I really must begin that, especially when there is too much of something. Our guts can benefit from the addition of fermented foods to the diet. I’ll have to dig into your archives for more information on your method. Thanks for challenging and informing us! The Stallard beans are beautiful. Are they similar to cranberry beans? Oh to have room to grow beans for drying.
The Good Mother Stallard beans are very similar in size and shape to cranberry and borlotti beans. And I think they are good for many of the same things, like soups and salads.
Your pizzas always look so good. I love the beans too. I haven’t dried my own beans for eating before (but have saved them for sowing)….if I’m lucky I might get enough to have a go this year.
Ditto on the pizza comments … I don’t know how I can tell from the picture but the crust looks chewy, just the way I like. 🙂
Yes, it is chewy. The pizza stone and whole wheat seem to make for a nice crust.
Everything looks delicious. Must be nice to have so much garden produce preserved for the winter months plus a few fresh veggies too. I’ve been using dried cherry tomatoes on pizza too and they are so delicious!
I am always glad to have the dried tomatoes. They wound up in a frittata yesterday.
I make a white pizza with sourdough crust and an arugula salad on top. It is pretty good.