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Monday, December 5, 2016

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.

5 comments:

  1. Sounds like a nice time in the SLO area. Your chard recipe sounds really delicious; I want to try it.

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  2. We are exactly the same and only harvesting as we need fresh veg and we don't record herbs either

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  3. I agree with Will, it does sound like a nice getaway to the coast! The chard is lovely, and the leaves must be big looking at the weights. I wish I could develop a taste for it, but it hasn't happened so far. Everything else in your harvest sounds yummy, and I never met an Ahi tuna I didn't like either!

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  4. That chermoula marinade sounds delicious - might give it a try this weekend (though maybe not Ahi Tuna as not so easy to get around here). Ooh the coast ... Pismo Beach and San Luis Obispo bring back long distant memories of a road trip from Vancouver to Tijuana (and long distance memories of my younger days, ha!).

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  5. Happy anniversary! Sounds like a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend it :)

    That cilantro looks so wonderful! I never did end up getting any into the garden this year. I've never heard of chermoula sauce so had to look it up; looks like something I would really enjoy, so I'm making a note of that one. I hope the frost didn't do too much damage.

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