Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. The harvests are still slow here, and I only have a small cutting of greens from the greenhouse to share this week. It’s a mix of arugula and tatsoi plus a few chives I cut from the Wild Garden, where we let them bloom for the pollinators. They went into a frittata my wife cooked yesterday. It’s always nice to have a few fresh greens, even if they are small in number!
greens for frittata
I did cook up the Meadowlark kale I cut last time to go along with some slow cooker Chicken Tikka Masala I made. The slow cooker dish featured some of our frozen tomato sauce along with our shallots and a bit of our first ever harvest of turmeric which I dried and ground. I served it over brown rice. The kale cooked in a couple of minutes and was sweet and tender.
Chicken Tikka Masala
I also cooked up one of the Turkeyneck pumpkins from last year. This was the biggest of the lot and weighed in just shy of 10 pounds. The neck is all flesh, and still quite solid after 6 months in storage.
Turkeyneck pumpkin
It took several rounds of baking to get it all cooked up and turned into puree. This is my new favorite pumpkin for sweet and savory dishes. It was the sweetest of all the moschatas I grew last year, though not quite as productive as the Dickinson pumpkin. I got several containers for the freezer from this one, as well as enough to make a batch of slow cooker pumpkin flan. We decided the flan was okay, but not an improvement on my Maple Pumpkin Custard.
baked Turkeyneck squash
On the fermenting scene, the Honeyed Garlic (Ninniku Hachimitsu-Zuke) is ready to go in the refrigerator. It ferments for a month in a cool dark spot, then it is refrigerated where it keeps indefinitely. I just finished a jar I made in 2016, and these two new jars should last us for a while.
Honeyed Garlic
The garlic becomes candied and sweet as it ferments, while the garlic flavor infuses into the honey. It is another way to preserve garlic, and one of those things where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The honey winds up quite thin and runny as some of the moisture is drawn out of the garlic.
Honeyed Garlic after a month of fermenting
I started a couple of ferments last week using veggies I’ve never fermented before. The quart jar contains chunks of neck pumpkin, while the pint jar has sticks of jicama. Both are in 2% brine, and I’ve used glass Pickle Pebbles to keep the veggies submerged under the brine. I didn’t grow the jicama, though I’ve tried to grow it without any success so far. It took a bit less than a pound of the pumpkin to fill the jar and leave enough headroom for the weight. I’m anxious to try the Fermented Squash and Sesame Dip that Michelle (From Seed To Table) posted about recently. With lots of winter squash in storage I am looking for any and all ways to prepare them, and fermenting seemed worth trying. I’ll let both ferment for about two weeks before using.
winter squash and jicama fermenting
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!
Fermented jicama is a new one to me. Very interesting! I know you’ve posted about the honey fermented garlic before and I still want to make it. I’ll have to get some good garlic at the farmer’s market since I’m not growing my own any more.
I had an interesting experience with the dip. We didn’t eat all of it right away and after a few days I noticed that it was sort of separating. It turns out that it had continued to ferment in the fridge and was getting to be tangy and a bit spritzy. I ended up gently heating it to stop the fermentation and added a bit of maple syrup to balance the tanginess. It is still good after the “treatment” but the next time I make it I will either have to make sure it gets eaten more quickly or make less or I may steam the fermented squash along with the raw squash.
That’s good to know about the dip. I can see where it would continue fermenting. I may scale it back a bit and try to avoid leftovers.
That’s an impressive pumpkin.
That squash!!
Your chicken tikka masala looks delicious and the pumpkin custard sounds wonderful. It’s so interesting all the different ferments you’ve been trying. The honeyed garlic is especially intriguing.
I’ve been using our canned tomatoes to make sauce, it’s so different from store bought tomato sauce. I’ll definitely be canning more quartered tomatoes this year.
Wow the squash is aptly named! I like the look of all the ferments too.
I’ve had a few harvests this week but haven’t had chance to write a post unfortunately.
Having fresh greens at this time of year is most definitely a treat! I’m using snippings from my onion seedlings in dips and even that is special when the ground is still frozen solid 🙂 Oh, that Tikka Masala looks yummy! Even with our relatively bad year last season, I still have a lot of freezer/storage food to get through and the current season is almost among us – I think I need to do some tweaking when it comes to how much I’m growing.