Harvest Monday - December 5, 2016

It was pretty slow in the garden last week. At this time of year I mostly harvest on an "as needed" basis and Dave and I spent the weekend away celebrating our anniversary so I didn't need much from the garden. It was quite a civilized getaway, no camping this time, we spent a couple of nights at a delightful B&B in Arroyo Grande and enjoyed exploring the beach towns of Avila Beach, Pismo Beach, Morro Bay and other small towns along the coast. Of course we took a hike, a short (for us) but vigorous one that gave us a panoramic view of San Luis Obispo.

View of SLO from High School Hill (Bowden Ranch)

We enjoyed seeing plenty of wildlife along the coast including Pelicans, Sea Lions, Sea Otters, and much more.

Brown Pelican on Pismo Beach Pier

So, on to the harvests.

I don't tally my herb harvests and they rarely even get photographed, but this bunch of cilantro was in the basket with the one and only ripe (nearly) pepper that came from the IPK P 852 (Italy) plants. And I found a couple more tomatoes that were ripening, but those weren't tallied either since I'm tallying the tomatoes after they've ripened on the kitchen counter. I used the cilantro to make a chermoula sauce to marinate a thick Ahi tuna steak that I pan roasted and served with the chard shown below.

Peppermint Stick and Golden Chard

The chard was prepared using one of my long time favorite recipes, with chopped onions, pine nuts, raisins, and a splash of vinegar. Over the years I've modified the recipe to include the stems as well as the leaves. I chop the stems and saute them slowly with the onions and pine nuts until they've become tender and given up a lot of their moisture and volume. Then I add the chopped leaves and quickly wilt them and finish the dish with a splash of vinegar, although this time I used lemon juice to compliment the lemon in the chermoula sauce.

Sweet Horizon Snow Peas

The poor neglected snow pea plants produced a nice harvest of pods. I cut these into pieces since a few of them were a bit large and sauteed them in olive oil with some dried green fennel seeds and then added a diced tomato at the end. The flavor combination is unconventional for snow peas but came out great.

Honey Nut Butternut Squash

That's the last 2 butternut squash from the vines. The vines were dead and I figured the squash had a better chance of curing indoors now since the weather has become much more seasonal, cool during the day and cold at night. We had the first frost (surprise!) the morning that Dave and left for the weekend and I'm not sure what the toll was since we left before things warmed up and I haven't been out to the garden since we got home.

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

Golden chard - 1 lb.
Peppermint Stick chard - 7 oz.
Sweet Horizon snow peas - 10 oz.
IPK P 852 (Italy) pepper - 2.6 oz.
Honey Nut butternut squash - 1.3 lb.

Total harvests for the past week - 3.6 lb. (1.6 kg.)
2016 YTD - 927.4 lb. (420.7 kg.)

Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave on his blog Our Happy Acres, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.