Harvest Monday February 22, 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!