Harvest Monday - April 24, 2107

 The harvests were rather green last week.

I cut a nice basketful of pea shoots from the cover crop mix growing in the future tomato and pepper bed. That was the second and final harvest of pea shoots because since then I've cut the cover crop down and dug it in. (More on that in a future post). The shoots weighed in at about 1 1/3 pounds and were enough to include in 2 different meals. One night I wilted them with some sliced spring onions that I had caramelized in brown butter. Those accompanied some Duck, Rabbit & Truffle sausages. For the second preparation I chopped the shoots and sauteed them with some spring onions and chopped fava beans and served the mix piled on top of grilled bread with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and a sprinkling of truffle salt. Dave declared both preparations to be winners. I will definitely be including peas in the tomato/pepper bed cover crop mix in the future, it's a convenient way to slip a good amount of pea plants into the garden. The plants grow enough to get 2 or 3 harvests of shoots before they are cut down, although they aren't allowed to grow enough to produce peas.

Those Batavia broccoli shoots are sitting on top of the same harvest of pea shoots.

The Robin Hood fava beans are starting to size up. I harvested them twice last week.

And I harvested Batavia broccoli side shoots twice also.

Another dish that I prepared last week used the greens from the Golden Chard that I harvested the previous week. I adapted a recipe from Paula Wolfert's book The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen to use chard instead of spinach in her recipe for Maghrebi Veal Meatballs With Spinach and Chickpeas. And I adapted the recipe even further to use Tarbais beans instead of chickpeas since I didn't have any chickpeas on hand. It was most surely not authentic but it also was most surely delicious. I have no qualms about veering away from authenticity to take advantage of what I have on hand. The original recipe can be found online if you do a search.

And I'll also mention another dish we enjoyed that used up a pound of the spring onions that I've been pulling from the garden. I did harvest more of them last week but didn't photograph them. It was an adaptation of a recipe for a souffle that features caramelized onions and goat cheese. I substituted spring onions for regular bulbing onions and used buttermilk instead of whole milk since that's what I happened to have in the fridge. It came out pretty good, still needs a bit of work, but I wrote it up anyway and you can find the recipe on my recipe blog along with some notes on how I might change it.

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