Harvest Monday - January 8, 2018

Welcome to Harvest Monday. I'm stepping in for Dave of Our Happy Acres as the temporary host of Harvest Monday for the month of January while he takes a much deserved break from the task of hosting every week. Harvest Monday is where we celebrate all things harvest related. This is the place to share your latest harvests and what you've been doing with them. If you would like to link up you will find Mr. Linky at the end of this post.

New in the harvest basket is my first ever harvest of Kalettes. These are a cross between kale and Brussels sprouts. They look like mini heads of kale that grow on a stalk like Brussels sprouts.

Kalettes

Another first are ripe(ish) tomatoes plucked from the garden in January. I don't think I've ever harvested anything other than hard green unripe tomatoes in January when I've finally gotten around to clearing out the plants and I normally don't even bother to save those. That's the second harvest of the year, I didn't get around to photographing the ones I harvested on the first of the month/year.

January Tomatoes!

Not a first for January is another harvest of ripe peppers, mostly various Aji's (baccatums) and a few Ethiopian Browns, Jalapenos, and one Hungarian Magyar. That basket weighed in at almost 3 pounds.

This is a bit more wintry looking, a few radishes. Some are just thinnings that I kept for the greens, the others are China Rose and Bora King which should be purple but the first two that were large enough to harvest were off type white.

The old Batavia broccoli plants produced more shoots and the Broccolini plants another round of side shoots and I got another fennel bulb that grew from the root of a spring sown plant.

Speedy arugula isn't really a speedy grower at this time of year but some patience rewarded me with another basketful of leaves.

The Pink Plume celery is still producing short spindly stalks but they still taste good.

And one more round of Broccolini.

At this time of year I rely quite a bit on stored vegetables. Winter squash was on the menu a few times in the past week. When I cut into a large squash like one of the Terremoto that I grew last year I try to use it all up but not all in one dish. So a quarter of one of those Terremoto squash went into a squash and lentil soup with dried porcini mushrooms and dried fermented mustard greens, another quarter was pan fried and served in an Agrodolce sauce (one of Dave's absolute faves), another quarter went into a tomatoey stew with Tarbais beans and cabbage (recipe HERE), and the final quarter is in the fridge awaiting its fate.

Another meal featured a previous bounty of spinach that had gone into the freezer. I had made some buttery brioche for the holiday and needed to use up the last quarter of the loaf before it went bad so I made a sort of savory bread pudding with it and the spinach and some cheddar cheese. That was definitely worth repeating so I wrote up the recipe which you can find HERE.

If you have a harvest you want to show off then enter a link to your post below.

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