Happy Acres Blog

Harvest Monday December 12, 2016

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. I harvested several things from the garden and greenhouse last week, some as needed and some ahead of a predicted cold snap. I had one more head of Melissa savoy cabbage in the main garden, and I decided it was time to bring it in before it froze up solid. It’s been through several freeze/thaw cycles anyway, and it has held up amazingly well given it’s not protected in any way. It was medium sized, weighing in at 23 ounces, which is really a good size for us for fresh use. I used some of the outer leaves in a minestrone soup I cooked up, and I plan to use more in a batch of Italian Wedding Soup I have on the menu later this week. I only planted two heads of it this fall, and I can see me planting a bit more next year.

Melissa cabbage

Also in the greens department, I cut all I could from the four Dazzling Blue kale plants. This hardy newcomer has made a great first showing this year, with sturdy leaves typical for the lacinato types. Most of these went into a batch of kale and sweet potato hash I cooked up one night, and I saved out a few leaves to go in a pot of bean soup that is on the menu for tonight.

Dazzling Blue kale

My other harvest from the main garden was another newcomer here, Superschmelz kohlrabi. This is an o/p giant type that was recommended by one of my readers. It’s sure hardy, with the plants looking great here in December. I don’t yet know how it tastes but I will cut one up here soon. These four weighed in just shy of three pounds total.

Superschmelz kohlrabi

Most of my other harvests came from the greenhouse. I started lots of lettuce back in October, and I’ve planted out all I need, so I’ve been holding on to the leftover plants for harvesting as baby lettuce. I do this a lot, since I hate to throw good plants on the compost pile, and it’s no trouble other than remembering to water the plants in the plug flats. It made for some tender and colorful baby leaves, and considering the price of organic baby lettuce at the grocery I would say it was worth my time and effort in many ways! It’s a hodge-podge of everything I started, and I see the colorful leaves of Jester, Pele and Outstanding in there along with the green leaf types.

baby lettuce

I made another cutting of Vivid Choi from the greenhouse. This one can be harvested as a baby green, but I’ve let my plants grow to get the mature leaves. They have crunchy stems and mild flavored greens, and the plants grow upright which is always a space-saving plus in intensive plantings. I’m only cutting the outer leaves, so hopefully the plants will keep on producing throughout the winter. These went into a stir fry, chopped and added at the last minute and heated just until the greens wilted a bit but the stems were still crisp.

Vivid Choi

I also cut one Mei Qing pac choi to go in the stir fry. I’ve got about 10 plants growing in a window box planter in the greenhouse, and my plan is to harvest them as needed and let the others grow on. Mei Qing is my favorite green stemmed choi, tolerant to both heat and cold, and can be harvested anywhere from the baby stage on up the medium size mature plants. This one was somewhere in between those two sizes, and just right for the stir fry.

Mei Qing pac choi

It’s certainly not harvest related, but I mentioned in my last post that I had recently bought a clay baking dish. Breadtopia was having a 10% off Cyber Monday sale, and since I was running low on Red Fife wheat I decided to buy their oval clay baker while I was putting in an order. It’s their version of the Romertopf clay baker, but designed specifically with bread baking in mind. The baker serves as a mini clay oven, taking the place of a hot pizza stone. And when the cover is in place, it also traps the steam given off by the baking bread which makes for a crispy golden-brown crust without having to spritz the bread or oven with water. For my first loaf I used a no-knead recipe from Breadtopia called Cranberry-Pecan Extraordinaire. It turned out great, and the bits of pecans and dried cranberries complimented the tartness of the naturally leavened sourdough. I’ll share more of my clay baker experiences in a later post.

Cranberry-Pecan Extraordinaire bread

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!

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Posted in Harvest Monday | 6 Comments

More Fermenting Fun

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Dave @ HappyAcres

I thought I would share a quick update on some of my latest fermenting activities. For the last year or so it seems there has always been something cooking on the kitchen countertop, and that’s no less true today in December. At the moment I have a half gallon jar of water kefir fermenting, plus a bottle of ginger beer carbonating. They are sharing space with a jar of turnip ‘pickles’ and two jars of kohlrabi kimchi.

my current fermentation projects

It is safe to say I have become a big fan of kimchi, now that I have been making it myself and toning down the heat a bit. I’ve made several batches of kimchi using napa cabbage (baechu kimchi), and one batch using cubed daikon radish (kkakdugi). I’ve been enjoying both of them, especially the crunchy kkakdugi. I’ve been using mostly my own ingredients, including the hot peppers, but I recently broke down and bought a bag of Korean Chili Flakes (Gochugaru) to see what they would add to the kimchi. I decided to make a batch using kohlrabi instead of daikon, spiced up with the gochugaru, and I’m glad I did.

kohlrabi kimchi

I loosely followed a recipe I found online. After peeling the kohlrabi, I diced it into bite size cubes, then brined for about six hours in a 5% solution of sea salt and water. I drained the kohlrabi, saving some of the brine for later. Then I made a paste of garlic, ginger, scallions, gochugaru, soy sauce and fish sauce. After chopping it all up in the food processor, I mixed it in with the kohlrabi cubes then packed it in a pint jar. I used the brine to top off the jar, then covered with a loosely screwed on lid.

kohlrabi kimchi up close

After bubbling furiously for a few days, that first batch was ready to start tasting in about a week. I left it out on the counter to keep on fermenting, and two weeks later it is still there – at least the half a jar I haven’t eaten yet! The kohlrabi is crunchy, tart and pleasantly hot. I’ve been snacking on it most every day, and I like it so much I started a second batch. I used a tablespoon of gochugaru in the first batch, which proved to be a bit much for my wimpy taste buds, so I cut it back by half for the second jar. I also used a bit less soy and fish sauce this time. The above photo doesn’t really do it justice, since you can’t smell or taste it, but at least you can see what the finished product looks like.

sourdough loaf baking on pizza stone

In other fermenting news, I’ve been practicing my sourdough bread baking skills lately. I’m taking an online class to see if I can learn any new tricks, and that required baking a loaf over the weekend. I shaped the dough into a batard, then baked on a hot pizza stone. Before baking, I spritzed the top of the dough with water and then covered with the top of a turkey roaster to keep in the steam. The end result was a tangy bread with a crackly crust and a nice open crumb. It was underproofed a bit, but still quite edible.

crumb shot of the sourdough bread

Now I’m looking forward to more sourdough baking adventures in the weeks to come. I tend to bake more bread in winter, since that is prime soup season here, and to me nothing goes better together than homemade bread and a bowl of soup. I’m glad the gym membership is paid up, because I’m going to need to amp up my exercise routine if I keep on baking more bread!

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Posted in Food, Preserving | Tagged bread, kimchi, kohlrabi, lacto-fermentation, napa cabbage, radish, sourdough | 3 Comments

Harvest Monday December 5, 2016

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. I managed to bring in several fresh harvests last week. First up were the turnips, literally pulled up from the main garden. I harvested the red skinned Tsugaru Scarlet and Scarlet Ohno Revival plus the white salad turnips Oasis. There was a little over five pounds total of roots and greens before cleaning and trimming them up.

Tsugaru Scarlet Turnips

The Tsugari Scarlet is a Japanese variety that I generally use for pickling or kraut. This year I decided to make fermented ‘pickles’ out of them, since we still have lots of kraut in the frig. The flesh inside these turnips is white with streaks of reddish pink, and I think it has a fairly spicy flavor.

inside of Tsugaru Scarlet turnip

I cut them into wedge shapes, then packed them in a quart jar along with a few cloves of garlic and added a 2% brine solution I made with sea salt and water. I’ll leave them sit on the kitchen counter for a week or two. They should turn to a uniform shade of pink after they have fermented. After less than two days they were bubbling away on the counter, and turning the brine pink, so they are off to a good start.

Tsugaru scarlet turnips fermenting

The Oasis has white skin and white fleshed roots with a mild flavor, and I think the greens are as tasty as the roots. All the turnips had been through several freeze cycles, but seemed none the worse for it. My wife cooked the Oasis roots up with the greens for a side dish one night.

Oasis turnip

It’s my first time growing the Scarlet Ohno Revival. I grew these mostly for the greens, but I have to say the roots were a pleasant surprise. I thought the skin was a little tough, perhaps because I left them grow for a long time, but after peeling the roots cooked up nice and tender. The inside flesh was white with pink flecks, though not quite as striking as the Tsugaru Scarlet.

Scarlet Ohno Revival turnip

Other than turnips, I pulled the last of the mature lettuce from the cold frame beds. I had three plants of Tall Oaks left. They too had been through several cycles of freezing and thawing, but unlike the turnips they were protected by the cold frames. Tall Oaks is a Wild Garden Seed creation of oak leaf types crossed with romaines, and wound up being one of my favorites of the lettuces I grew this year. The plants are not completely uniform in size, color or shape, but most of mine turned out to be tall green oak leaf types. I cut them anywhere from the baby to the mature stage, and all had tender leaves with a crunchy midrib. Some of this wound up in a turkey taco salad, which also featured some of the cilantro sprouts I am growing, along with leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

harvest of Tall Oaks lettuce

The other harvest I got last week was pea shoots, grown indoors under fluorescent lights in the basement. This variety is Dwarf Grey Sugar, an heirloom snow pea. There’s about three ounces of them in this cutting, and we stir fried them very briefly. We cooked a couple of big King Oyster mushrooms first, then added the pea shoots right at the end and turned off the heat. We gave them a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil and served them up as a quick side dish. I say ‘we’ in the prep details because it was a joint effort between me and my wife, as we collaborated on preparing this first harvest of shoots. I’ve got more of the Dwarf Grey Sugar shoots left, and I’ve started a second batch of shoots using Johnny’s Field Peas, which it says are the ‘preferred pea’ for shoots. We should know in a few days which one of the two we prefer.

pea shoots

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Posted in Harvest Monday | Tagged lacto-fermentation, lettuce, pea shoots, Tsugaru Scarlet, turnips | 10 Comments

Experiments with Growing Shoots and Micro Greens

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Dave @ HappyAcres

The last couple of months I have been experimenting with growing micro greens and shoots. My wife and I had bought them a couple of times at local farmer’s markets, so I decided to try my hand at growing them myself. I’m learning as I go along, so this is a beginner’s how-to tutorial and a progress report on my trials and results. For my first project back in October I sowed Johnny’s Mild Micro Mix in a plastic window box planter I had on hand. I filled the planter with potting soil (PRO-MIX Ultimate Organic Mix), then sowed the seed thickly and covered lightly with more potting soil. I left this one in the greenhouse, since the temperatures out there were favorable at the time.

micro greens in window box planter

I got good germination from the seeds, and the greens were ready for cutting in a couple of weeks. I chose to try and get multiple cuttings from this planting, so I tried to cut the leaves above the growing point so they would regrow. That strategy worked, and I have gotten several cutting from them now. The greens are really bigger than the ‘micro’ stage though, more like baby greens, but very nice for salads, stir frying or soups. This mix of mild flavored brassicas has mizuna, cabbage, kale and kohlrabi seeds in it. It looks like mostly kale came up in mine, which is not a bad thing, but a problem I often see with mixes like this where one thing does better than the others.

Small Seed Tray

For my next project I bought some specialized seed trays from Greenhouse Megastore. The injected molded plastic trays are manufactured in England by Garland Products, and are really sturdy and well made. I got two sizes, one a Narrow Seed Tray that is 14.5″ long by 5.25″ wide, and a Small Seed Tray that is 9″ long by 6.5″ wide. Both of these have drainage holes in the bottom, and the sizes are such that you can fit two of the narrow trays and one of the small trays in a standard 1020 flat. That will let me grow three different things in the space taken up by one flat, rather than having to plant the whole thing to just one veggie.

Garland seed trays for micro greens and shoots

I also ordered an assortment of seeds from Pinetree and Johnny’s, including seeds for sprouting, micro greens and for shoots. For my first planting using the new trays, I decided on growing pea and sunflower shoots, plus cilantro. The peas and sunflower seeds benefit from soaking overnight in water. They can then be planted immediately, or you can do like I did and let them sprout first. So I soaked the seeds in pint jars, then drained the water and let them sit out on the kitchen counter, rinsing with water a couple of times daily. In about two days the first roots were emerging, with the peas germinating a bit quicker than the sunflowers. Now it was time for planting.

soaking pea seeds for shoots

I filled the seed trays with the same PRO-MIX potting soil I used earlier for the micro greens. I only filled them about 1-1/2″ deep, so it didn’t take a lot of soil. I sowed the seed quite thickly on the top of the soil, being careful not to break the tender emerging roots on the peas and sunflowers, then I gave them a good watering. I used 1/3 cup each (before soaking) of the sunflowers and peas to fill the larger trays, and a couple of tablespoons of unsoaked cilantro seed for the small one. Instead of covering the seeds with soil, I sat empty seed trays on top of the seeds and put the flat under my lights I have in the basement. As soon as the seeds began pushing up the trays, I removed them. You can also cover the seeds with paper towels, or use soil like I did for the micro greens. I have to say the trick of ‘nesting’ the empty trays on top worked quite well, and is very easy to do as long as you have extra trays.

sunflower and pea shoots

After about five days of growing, everything is coming along fine. The pea shoots are ready for snacking, and the sunflowers won’t be far behind. The cilantro was the last to begin sprouting, but it is coming up now as well. I need to brush the sunflowers to remove the seed coats from the cotyledons (seed leaves), as some are still clinging on.

cilantro sprouting

I will be growing more shoots and micro greens in the days and weeks to come. I intend to grow them under my fluorescent lights in the basement, which are not much in use this time of year. It should be a quick and easy way to give us fresh green things to eat during the cold days of winter, in addition to what I can harvest from the greenhouse and cold frames. I’ll be back with more updates as my experiments continue. And I would love to hear from my readers who have experimented themselves in this area, both in growing as well as using them!

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Posted in Gardening | Tagged cilantro, growing indoors, micro greens, peas, shoots, sunflower | 7 Comments

Harvest Monday November 28, 2016

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. It was a light harvest week for me, as we tried to eat up all the stuff from previous harvests that was taking up space in the refrigerator. I did get my first taste of the Dazzling Blue kale, which I harvested so we could have it for a side dish on Thanksgiving. This kale is a Wild Garden Seeds cross between Lacinato and Lacinato Rainbow, and it was billed as being more winter hardy than most Lacinato types. That sure seems to be true here, as it survived our 19°F weather just fine, while most of the other kale plants in the main garden are looking a bit frost-bitten. The sturdy leaves cooked up tender, and the flavor was very much like a Lacinato. This one is a keeper, if just for the extra hardiness.

Dazzling Blue kale

Also for Thanksgiving I baked up one of the neck pumpkins so my wife could make a pumpkin pie. This one weighed a bit over seven pounds, and I got about two pounds of puree from it after draining off quite a bit of liquid after baking. It took three baking dishes to get it all in the oven at once.

neck pumpkin pieces after baking

We don’t eat pie very often here at Happy Acres, but it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without my wife’s Whiskey Pumpkin Pie. In addition to adding a bit of whiskey to the batter, she also beats the egg whites separately and folds them in the mix at the last. It results in a pie that is lighter than most I’ve ever eaten. The neck pumpkin wasn’t as sweet as the butternuts this year, but that’s not a bad thing in a pie which has added sugar anyway.

Whiskey Pumpkin pie

Also in the non-harvest department, since early this month I have been fermenting a quart jar of Aji Angelo peppers to turn into hot sauce (recipe here). It took over two pounds of the peppers to fill the jar, and I let them ferment for 18 days. I took half the peppers and turned them into Homemade Fermented Hot Sauce, a thin tabasco-style sauce. For this recipe you chop the fermented peppers up in the food processor, then press the juice out through a metal strainer. That leaves behind quite a bit of pepper pulp that doesn’t go through the strainer. I spread all that out on a piece of parchment paper, and dried it in the dehydrator to turn into pepper flakes. I used a low 115°F heat setting so as to try and preserve some of the beneficial bacteria, and it was dry in a few hours time. The dried flakes have a lot of flavor, and a bit of saltiness, and the Aji Angelo peppers give them a mild level of heat will be useful in a lot of dishes.

pepper flakes and hot sauce

I used the rest of the fermented peppers to make a batch of Homemade Sriracha-Style Hot Sauce. For this recipe you throw the fermented peppers in the blender along with vinegar, sugar and garlic. Then I strain the sauce through a strainer with a bit coarser mesh than what I used for the other sauce, so most of the solids go through but any bits of seed or skin stay behind. The result is a thick, slightly sweet and mildly hot Sriracha sauce that I love to use in the kitchen. My latest favorite thing to do with it is make Sriracha mayo, which went on some lettuce wraps we made last week using leftover turkey. I got two 5 ounce bottles of Sriracha from the process, so I should be set for a while!

Aji Angelo Sriracha sauce

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Posted in Harvest Monday | Tagged Aji Angelo, hot sauce, kale, lacto-fermentation, neck pumpkin, pumpkin pie, Sriracha | 8 Comments

Happy Acres Blog

Harvest Monday December 12, 2016

More Fermenting Fun

Harvest Monday December 5, 2016

Experiments with Growing Shoots and Micro Greens

Harvest Monday November 28, 2016

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Harvest Monday December 12, 2016

More Fermenting Fun

Harvest Monday December 5, 2016

Experiments with Growing Shoots and Micro Greens

Harvest Monday November 28, 2016

SEARCH THIS SITE

Welcome to Happy Acres!

Happy Acres Weather Station

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

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NOW READING

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SOME OF THE BLOGS I FOLLOW