Harvest Monday - January 18, 2016

Welcome to Harvest Monday, you get another week of me hosting and I'll remind everyone that Dave of Our Happy Acres will resume as host on February 1.

We continue to feast from the garden. I combined the Golden beet below and the previously harvested funky Chioggia beet and giant Gladiator parsnip in a root veggie roast. I noticed that the Chioggia beet retained some of its stripes when I peeled it and roasted it in chunks. My usual method is to roast it in its skin and then rub off the skin and when roasted that way the stripes disappear.

Renee's Golden Beet

The Red Baron beets were roasted in their skins, peeled and incorporated into a salad that I based very loosely on a recipe from Ottolenghi's Plenty More.

Red Baron Beets

My version of the beet salad included baby Red Iceberg lettuce and some thinnings of Rishad Cress, along with some flat leaf parsley that I didn't photograph or include in my tally. The recipe called for entirely different greens that I don't happen to have so I used what I do have. And it called for shelled peas for which I substituted pieces of sugar snap peas.

Red Iceberg and Rishad Cress

The Rishad cress is a very finely cut cress from Iraq that tastes much like the Dutch Broadleaf cress that I grew last year. I first read about the Rishad cress in William Woys Weaver's book 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From. I got the seeds from a member of the Seed Savers Exchange who got her seeds from Mr. Weaver. It's fun to know that the cress I'm growing is undoubtedly the same as the one in the book.

Spigariello Foglia Riccia

The branches on the Spigariello Foglia Riccia plant remind me of octopus tentacles, they reach out all over the place. I cut off another branch and trimmed off the shoots and ended up with a nice basket of kale like leaves. This time I steamed the little shoots in my pressure cooker for 3 minutes and they came out perfectly tender. I used half of the steamed shoots in a sort of stew with Cotechino sausage, tomato puree, onions, and crispy bits of duck skin from some confited duck legs from which I had used just the meat. 

Spigariello Foglia Riccia

The spinach plants were starting to fill up their cloches again so it was time for another harvest.

Summer Perfection

My Dave requested an old favorite spinach preparation - wilted with pancetta, garlic, raisins, pine nuts, pepper flakes, and a splash of vinegar.

Verdil

And I got another couple of handfuls of snow and snap peas. Most of the peas that I harvested still showed signs of frost damage from a few weeks ago but I also got a few that escaped the old man.

Golden Sweet and Super Sugar Snap peas

The broccoli plants aren't so vigorous lately but I'm still getting some small side shoots.

Di Ciccio and Batavia broccoli, and Apollo brokali

The side shoots came in just in time because I had used up the last of the previous harvest in a stir fry with tofu, snow peas, onions, garlic and ginger. My favorite sauce for broccoli and tofu stir fry is oyster flavored sauce with some chile garlic sauce and sherry. It was a nice change of pace from my usual Mediterranean style of cooking.

It's time to get a cover crop started in the bed where the parsnips have been growing since July so I harvested all the remaining roots.

Gladiator Parsnips

Dave said that I needed to put a yardstick in the photo to get some perspective on the size of the roots, the largest ones are over 18 inches (45 cm) long. The whole lot weighed in at 6 pounds (2.7 kg.) as shown.  So my total parsnip harvests, including the 2.7 pounds from 2015, came to 11.4 pounds (5.2 kg.). I can't complain about that, I didn't really expect to get much of anything since I had such a hard time getting the seedlings started and lost a lot of them to sowbugs.

Here's the details of the harvests for the past week:

Red Baron beets - 1 lb., 2.8 oz.
Renee's Golden beets - 8.5 oz.
Apollo brokali - 2.5 oz.
Batavia broccoli - 4.1 oz.
Di Ciccio broccoli - 5.2 oz.
Spigariello Foglia Riccia broccoli - 1 lb., 5.8 oz.
Rishad cress - 1.4 oz.
Red Iceberg lettuce - 1.8 oz.
Gladiator parsnips - 6 lb.
Super Sugar Snap peas - 5.5 oz.
Golden Sweet snow peas - 3.6 oz.
Summer Perfection spinach - 7.8 oz.
Verdil spinach - 8.7 oz.

Total for the week - 11 lb., 10.4 oz. (5.3 kg.)
2016 YTD - 16 lb., 14.7 oz. (7.7 kg.)

Harvest Monday is a place to showcase everything harvest related, what you've harvested, how you are preserving your harvests, and how you are using your harvests. You needn't be harvesting anything new to participate, write a post about how you've been using your preserved harvests and then link up. I'm sure we could all use some inspiration when it comes to using up the canned tomatoes and frozen veggies that we all worked so hard to produce and preserve. If you want to join in the fun just add your name and a link to your post in Mister Linky below. Then stop by the other linked posts to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting and cooking up lately.

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