It’s time for Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. This will be a quick post for me as harvests are pretty slim at the moment. However I dug some horseradish roots which provided a small but pungent addition to some of our recent meals. The bed is a couple of years old now, and I am finally getting decent roots. They don’t look like much, and if you haven’t grown horseradish you might not even recognize them. But peel away the outer skin and you have a pure white root that is hot and fragrant when grated. I mix it with a little vinegar after grating and put in the refrigerator where it will keep for several months.
horseradish root
We also got our first taste of the collard kraut last week. I packed whole leaves in a two gallon crock then covered with a 3% brine solution and let it ferment for two weeks. The leaves are not really that tender, so I chopped them up and cooked them much like I would the raw greens. They softened up nicely after cooking, and while I enjoyed the strong flavored kraut, my wife decided they weren’t an improvement over the fresh greens. I will experiment more with them in the weeks to come.
collard kraut
And last night I made bean enchiladas for dinner and used fermented collard leaves instead of tortillas for the wrapper. They had a great flavor, and I think my next experiment will be to use a cabbage roll type stuffing for the collards. I have a half gallon jar of them so I should have plenty to play with.
collard kraut enchiladas
In the sweets department, my wife baked a pumpkin pie for a carry-in dinner and used our neck pumpkin puree for the filling. She plans to make another one for our Thanksgiving dinner, and I am looking forward to it since I only got to look at this one!
pumpkin pie
I’ve decided it makes sense to take a break from the Harvest Monday posts until February. Harvests are few and far between this time of year, and I am enjoying a bit of downtime from gardening, as are many other gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere. I’ll be back with Harvest Monday on February 3rd. I will post about other garden news as it happens though!
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!