Harvest Monday - December 14, 2015

Perhaps I should have titled this post Harvestless Monday. This is the first week in a LONG time that I've not harvested anything without the excuse of being out of town. There's actually a few things in the garden that I could have harvested - broccoli, a handful of snow peas, and a bunch of parsnips, but I didn't get around to it. I hate to miss a Harvest Monday post though so I'll post about a dish I made with some of the bounty of peppers that the garden produced this year.

I had my best year ever for peppers so there's dried peppers, preserved peppers, and frozen peppers that are waiting to be consumed. Last week I wanted to use up a pound of frozen green Anaheim chile peppers that were sitting in the freezer, they had been roasted and peeled but I didn't have time to remove the cores and seeds before tossing them in the freezer. They had priority on the "use it up" list since they were frozen in a tub instead of preserved in vacuum sealed bags.

I wanted to try something with the peppers that I hadn't done before and had in mind a souffle or souffled omelet. A search of my Eat Your Books list of indexed recipes came up blank but I did come across a number of recipes for sweet corn pudding souffles and it seemed like it would be easy to adapt one of the recipes to use peppers instead of corn. And it worked out brilliantly! I've posted the recipe on my recipe blog here so I'm not going to duplicate it, but I'll describe it briefly. It's much like a traditional souffle but not as light, the souffle base is more substantial. It's also prepared in 2 steps, first you bake the souffles and then let them cool and fall. Then the souffles are unmolded and baked again just before serving. They puff up a bit, not as tall as during the initial baking, but they are lighter than you would expect a pudding to be.

Green Chile Pudding Souffle

The versatility of the recipe has got me inspired now. I think it's almost infinitely adaptable to a number of vegetables. I'm thinking that broccoli (which I still have in abundance) would be a good base. And I don't see why it couldn't be flavored with 2 or more vegetables. The souffle base has half of the veggies pureed into it and the rest of the veggies are chopped and folded into the mix. I'm thinking that a puree of eggplant and chopped roasted sweet red peppers would be a nice combo and I've got both of those in the freezer. The souffles are finished by baking them with some cream but I think they would also be good finished with a tomato sauce. So I've been dreaming of the various pudding souffles I would like to try - zucchini, asparagus, artichokes, grilled onions, and of course sweet corn when it comes back in season.

Pudding souffles at 20, 25, and 30 minutes.

So that's my contribution to Harvest Monday this week. I hope I've been able to inspire some of you with a way to use up some of your harvests.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave on his blog Our Happy Acres, head on over there to be inspired by what other garden bloggers have been harvesting or cooking up.