Two new items made their way into the harvest basket this week.
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| Little Jade Napa Cabbage |
The incredible rodent resistant, avian averse, even earwig free Little Jade Napa cabbage. Winner! Weighing in at nearly 4 pounds it delivers at least a 4 meal punch. First round went to Dave's request of
Okonomiyaki pancakes. Round 2 delivered a quick and easy
Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup thanks to a recipe from Mark Bittman at NYT Food. Oooh, it was tough deciding between his Hot and Sour or the quick and easy Beef Pho, Hot and Sour won because it required no shopping. Next up, I have my eye on a recipe from Food52 for a
Napa Cabbage Wedge Salad with Apples and Buttermilk Dressing. And then? And then, actually, I have to harvest the second head of cabbage still growing in the garden so then I really have to get creative.
New item #2. The winter potato experiment comes to an end.
They looked a lot better when they were still really dirty because after cleaning them up a bit they looked pretty rough. Nothing, I hope, that some scrubbing and peeling won't resolve. Overall I would say that the experiment was something of a success. From three not so perfect to begin with small spuds I got a bonus crop of 2.7 pounds from a spot in the garden that would have produced at most a cover crop. Not bad considering that all I did was put them into the soil back at the end of September with no special treatment other than to fence them off to protect them from critters. Perhaps they might of looked better if I had dug them up a month or two ago? I'll report back another time on their edibility.
And finally I uncovered the snow peas one more time and got nearly another pound of peas for my effort. This round looks quite good!
Dave wanted me to take a photo of the Okonomiyaki so here it is. A food photographer I am not.
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| Okonomiyaki |
Remember those jars of fermenting veggies I showed a few posts back (
HERE)? One of the jars was filled with Terremoto winter squash. This week I used most of the fermented squash in combination with a fraction of a freshly cut up Terremoto squash to make a
Fermented Squash and Sesame Dip. I did make a few alterations to the recipe based on what I did and did not have on hand, but I didn't deviate from the recipe too much. It may sound a bit weird but it is absolutely delicious. I'm going to ferment another jar of squash just so that I can make the dip again. Another fraction of that freshly cut up squash went into a Thai Style Winter Squash and Tofu Stew from Deborah Madison's book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but for that one I made some significant alterations to the recipe, like adding a pound of cauliflower and using red curry paste instead of curry powder, but I don't doubt that her recipe would have resulted in a dish at least as delicious as what I made. There's still a LOT of squash left, I think I'll have to find a recipe for something with it and cabbage.
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.
Well done on the potato succes
ReplyDeleteThank you Sue!
DeleteThat cabbage looks so good! And well done for being so creative in using it too: all the dishes you made sound fresh and delicious
DeleteThat's a beautiful head of cabbage and those spring peas look amazing. It's pretty interesting with the overwintered potatoes, I could see trying that when we have an extra warm winter. Fall planted onions is another thing I'd like to try.
ReplyDeleteThe difficulty would be predicting an extra warm winter. The potatoes did spend some time under frost cloth on the coldest nights and then they got covered up with lightweight row cover when I was protecting the surrounding cover crop from the birds. That did help to keep the potato foliage from being killed by cold weather.
DeleteThat is awesome with the potatoes, especially as an "extra" crop! I'm sure they will be savoured. And that's one gorgeous Napa cabbage. After my last attempt at growing Napa - more earwig & slug holes than cabbage - I'm still not ready to try again.
ReplyDeleteLast year all my Napa cabbages got attacked by earwigs. But overall there were just more earwigs in the garden. I wonder if it was because it was so wet last winter.
DeleteOk, now I am going to ferment some of my moschata squash I have in storage! The dip and the stew sounds like a good way to use the fermented squash, which surely has a different flavor than it does before fermenting. How long did you let it ferment?
ReplyDeleteI also made a note of the Hot and Sour cabbage soup, actually I pinned the whole page since I want to try a couple of those other recipes when it's cabbage season around here. I doubt my napa cabbages will ever look as pretty as your Little Jade cabbage though!
I let the squash ferment about 2 1/2 weeks. It ended up tangy and lost most of its sweetness but what surprised me was that it stayed quite firm. I had read that it would get soft but mine didn't. Perhaps it would get soft if left to ferment longer.
DeleteYes, that cabbage article is a treasure trove for when you have a glut of cabbage. I was focused on soup when I found it but I have to go back and look at more of the recipes.
Agree with Dave. Want to make all those cabbage recipes especially the soup. That 'Little Jade' is a gem. I'm with the other Dave, too, I like that type of pancake, too.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you noticed, but the recipe just calls for cabbage but I've always used Napa cabbage. And with another head of cabbage ready to harvest I'll be going back to check out the rest of those cabbage recipes.
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