Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. It was a light harvest week for me as we mostly ate on fresh veggies I had harvested already. I used one of the small cabbages for a side dish, thinly slicing the cabbage then sautéing in olive oil until just crisp tender. I kept it simple and seasoned with salt and pepper plus a bit of minced garlic.
sautéing cabbage
We’ve also been eating a lot from veggies in stores. I cooked another of the Thelma Sanders acorn squashes. This is an heirloom squash with a cream colored skin, and it was my first year growing it.
inside of Thelma Sanders squash
My favorite treatment so far is to cut it into slices and roast it in the oven. I used a cast iron skillet this time which browned the flesh up nicely. Like a delicata squash the skin is edible on this one, and I think it has a mild nutty flavor that the roasting helps bring out.
roasted Thelma Sanders squash
And I stir-fried some of the Scarlette cabbage I harvested last week, along with a bit of kohlrabi and some King Oyster mushrooms. The cabbage lost its purplish-pink color but had a great flavor. It would make a colorful addition to salads or spring rolls, and I plan to grow it again next year.
leaves of Scarlette cabbage
My only harvest of the weeks came in the form of sunflower shoots. This is one of my favorite sprouting seeds to use on salads, and that’s where this batch wound up. I grow them indoors under lights and they are usually ready in about a week from start to finish. I’ll start another round today.
sunflower shoots
We have a new kitchen appliance that I have been cooking with lately. When I first heard about the popular Instant Pots I thought “but we already have a slow cooker, a rice cooker and a stovetop pressure cooker.” I use the pressure cooker quite a bit, the rice cooker occasionally and the slow cooker very rarely. But we are doing a kitchen makeover project early next year that will leave us without a stove or oven for at least a month, and that had us scrambling to think how we would cook during that time period. The Instant Pot should help, since we can set it up outside the kitchen and cook quite a few things that way. I’ve already made bean soup and chalupas using the pressure cooker setting, and I have veggie soup and chili con carne on the menu for this week. The Instant Pot can’t bake bread though, so I’ve been experimenting with the microwave’s convection feature to do that. The contractor is coming today to remove a couple of cabinets, so let the fun and games begin!
Instant Pot
A couple of weeks ago I shared a pic of one of the larger woodpeckers that visit our suet feeders, a Red-bellied Woodpecker. Today I’ll share an image of the smallest woodpecker to visit here, indeed the smallest woodpecker in North America. It’s the Downy Woodpecker, and this one is a male with the identifying red patch on the back of his head. We see quite a few of these small woodpeckers that are about the size of a House Sparrow or Purple Finch.
male Downy woodpecker
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!