Harvest Monday - December 1, 2014

There was a bit of summer flavor left in the harvests last week. Cucumber and zucchini vines are lingering in the garden and still producing. The zucchinis are on the small side and not completely pollinated but the long neck portions are firm and perfectly good.

The snow peas continue to size up and there were a few more pods of Tarbais beans that had dried on the nearly expired vines. The Di Ciccio broccoli plants popped a few more shoots which continue to get smaller as the year wanes. Last week I adapted a recipe for a salad from Yotam Ottolenghi's new book Plenty More, his recipe called for sprouting broccoli (✓), snow peas (✓), haricot vert (nope), so I substituted matchstick pieces of zucchini for the haricot vert. The veggies were blanched and tossed with cilantro (coriander) and toasted sesame seeds and a tahini/tamari dressing. It was a winner.

I pulled a few more volunteer Spanish Black carrots.

They are really vigorous growers, you can see how big the greens are getting, but the roots haven't gotten tough or woody. These went into a soup made from leftover Thanksgiving turkey, turkey broth, zucchini, blue corn posole, dried blue chanterelles, roasted green Sonora chiles, and various seasonings.

Thanksgiving dinner featured a couple goodies from the garden. We tried the first of the Honey Nut butternut squash. I peeled them, sliced them in thick rounds and sauteed them slowly in brown butter with sage. They were incredibly sweet and flavorful. I also ground some of the Cascade Ruby Gold flint corn and made a simple skillet corn bread. I really liked the recipe, it uses no sweetener and no wheat flour - it's just cornmeal, baking powder, salt, milk, egg, and butter. Baking it in a hot cast iron skillet produces a crisp crust and a rustic crumb. I'll be trying it again, maybe with some chile peppers next time.

Some of the fall planting of radishes are starting to size up.

Pink Beauty

Pink Punch

Helios

It wasn't until after I had discarded the lovely radish leaves that I came across a recipe for radish leaf pesto, so I'll have to wait for the next radish harvest to try that dish. The earlier sown Watermelon radishes continue to plump up also.

Unfortunately, something decided to do a bit of tunneling in this one, but I don't think it damaged the radish too much. I won't be able to slice it into beautiful thin rounds, but these radishes are also great cut into a thin julienne so I'll give this one that treatment after cutting away the munched parts.

And I harvested another generous bunch of Lacinato kale for a Kale, Apple, and Pomegranate Salad.

That was all the harvests for the week other than a couple of Muscade carrot thinnings that were big enough to add to the tally, here's the details:

Di Ciccio broccoli - 16.2 oz.

Muscade carrots - 1.9 oz.

Spanish Black carrots - 7.1 oz.

Green Fingers cucumbers - 1 lb., 13 oz.

Lacinato kale - 1 lb., 6.3 oz.

Golden Sweet snow peas - 5 oz.

Helios radishes - 2.4 oz.

Pink Beauty radishes - 1.3 oz.

Pink Punch radishes - .9 oz.

Watermelon radish - 8.4 oz.

Tromba d'Albenga zucchinis - 1 lb., 13.9 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 7 lb., 12.4 oz.

Which brings the harvests for 2014 up to - 1172 lb.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.