Beet Risotto

I love and appreciate the freezer, but I don't think we'd make it without the 'fresh' root crops from cold storage.  This is the first year we're trying to grow all our own vegetables and this past week I had a few difficult nights trying to get excited about frozen kale or butternut squash, again!  Over the weekend we made a few exciting plans for the week's meals and splurged on lots of dairy products.  Our grocery bills these days tend to center around tofu and seitan products and of course, dairy.  We bought cheddar, monterey jack, sour cream, cottage cheese, ricotta and butter.  The plans include a nice veggie lasagna and some good old Boston baked beans in our crock.  If I have a minute I'll post the crock and recipe later this week.  But, as for Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions, we did a nice broccoli raab risotto with a side of slow roasted beets.  We found that the best way to do beets is large julienne on the mandolin, a teaspoon of olive oil in a pan, cover and place on the woodstove while everything else cooks.  They seem to take only 20-25 minutes this way and cook in their own juices.  I find beets to be salty and sweet on their own, so I don't add anything else to them.  

This fall I packed the beets and carrots in wet sand but after a few weeks when the weather warmed considerably, I sorted them back out and removed the sprouts.  I wasn't sure if this was the best way to go, but I wanted to put the bigger ones on bottom and make pickled beets from the little ones.   Instead of sand I repacked with wet sawdust from our firewood pile.  I didn't have quite enough so used fresh pine shavings to finish.  After quite a bit of sharing and eating through mid-October we ended up with a tub each of beets and carrots, and only a crate of kohlrabi and cabbage.  The total canned amount of pickled beets was 25 pints. The fresh carrots are moving much more quickly than the fresh beets but we haven't yet touched our canned carrots!

 

The large golden beet was close to 2 pounds and I added a medium Detroit Red for a splash of color.  The risotto was delicious but took a LONG time since I had only brown rice.  Next time I'll check the cupboard first for short grain rice before prepping the other ingredients and getting my heart set on this meal.  

Harvest Monday Freezer Fiesta

Sadly, we've still got snow on the ground and the cold frame hasn't unthawed.  I'm waiting for a nice thaw to go for the parsnips - but at least enough snow has melted that I can see their tops poking out.  The kale is still buried as well.  I'm definitely looking forward to our hoop house!  Tonight it was back to the freezer for me...

I whipped up a stir-fry to cleanse a bit after the holidays.  It is enormous, and will give me lunches for most of the week.  The green beans and broccoli and New Zealand spinach were delicious, sauteed with some garlic, ginger juice and an onion.  We added fermented soybeans (whole) and a bit of soy sauce as well.  I don't love ginger bits in my food, so made a juice about a month back that still tastes great.  I think I've found a way to add ginger flavor without having to pick strong ginger bits from my teeth.  I just boil the ginger for 30 minutes or so on the wood stove and then strain it.  A tablespoon in chai tea or stir-fries adds nice depth without overpowering the dish.

The Waltham butternuts are delicious this year - sweet and crunchy, good enough to eat raw.  Which is wonderful, because we have so many.  They are resistant to the borers and escaped the cucumber beetle so they are the main squash we have in storage.  We have almost no buttercups and only 4-5 acorns, but the spagettis did fairly well too.  I think 4 of them are larger than 3 pounds and the others closer to 2 pounds.  I roasted the seeds from this one to snack on.  More fibrous than pumpkin, but tasty and a satisfying snack while I cook.  I realized yesterday that the garage is just too cold at around 45 degrees and I've been worried about reducing their shelf life.  After the last few weeks of procrastination I finally brought all the squashes from the garage up to the cold bedroom closet where they'll be closer to their proper range of 50-60 degrees F.  We have two full boxes remaining.  They are snuggled in between towels but they did look better down in the garage where we stored them in an old bureau... which was much easier to access and choose from.

A few of the 'edible rape' stalks were pretty stringy, but the broccoli more than compensated.  I bought a few seed packets in Chinatown and wasn't particularly pleased with them.  I waited for rape and 'chinese kale' to bulk up but I think the hot weather coupled with the drought (repair to our community garden's water line) inhibited lush growth.

The piece de resistance - yummy peach cobbler.  What is easier than opening up a bag of frozen peaches, crumbling some flour, butter, brown sugar and oats, and baking for 30 minutes? Don't forget to check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions. 

First Harvest Monday

We are going to join Harvest Monday, at long last!  We've been watching and reading each week about all the other gardener's harvests, and this year I have a new scale for a gift.  It is a hanging weight scale and reads up to 120 pounds (good for the large harvests of roots, squash, etc).  I am also bidding on a postal scale for the kitchen, for produce under 15 pounds.

Tonight for dinner we searched the freezer and root cellar - to come up with a minestrone soup.  A quart of tomatoes, dried oregano, a mix of our dried beans, carrots, potatoes, fresh parsley, grated zucchini and an onion - all with a tablespoon of pistou per bowl.  The only thing from the store was the 1/2 cup of pasta to maintain our soup as a true minestrone.  I love emptying space in the freezer now since we've recently added 25 pounds of a beef critter from my father's farm.

We had the day off due to the storm and I organized my seed catalogues, finalized garden maps and plans and wrote up the 'shares' since we may have some other folks to feed from our garden this year.  I may post these examples of shares, although August and September are the most exciting.

Winter Lulls

We're nearing the end of this 24 hour storm - but I took these photos when we returned home last night from Maine just when the storm was starting.

Despite the storm the chickens were crooning and singing to us - happy we were home and clearly excited about holiday left-overs.  They had laid 15 eggs neatly in rows in their nesting box while we were away - and all that remained of the last monster summer squash (harvested in July) was the tough shell.  I'd given them something to peck at while we were away and they appeared to have enjoyed it.

Coldframe - end of December

I decided to harvest the last of the greens from the coldframe - mostly going for the bok choy as that recovers well from a hard freeze.  We made a simple stir-fry for dinner last night with the bok choy, tofu and a julienned kohlrabi.  The coldframes were almost an afterthought this year and we didn't cover them, the wood wasn't insulated and the glass was single-pane, fitting poorly with some gaps.  We also were using up old seed and didn't have great germination on the cold-tolerant varieties, so I transplanted summer varieties to fill in the space.  All in all - a good showing as we ate lettuces and salads as well as raab and bok choy into the end of December.  As a comparison I'm uploading an earlier and later fall photo of the same coldframe:

Coldframe - end of October

Coldframe - end of November

Raspberry arbor

With M.Mann's help we built the tiny arbor with mostly reclaimed wood (meaning its fairly warped and asymmetrical).  The structure is simple with 2 x 4 posts, lattice up the sides, and 2 x 6 lintels sculpted with the jig-saw.  I noticed that a friend had some OLD redwood stain, and with 2-3 coats the streakiness fades.  The footers are actually sections of a PT 4 x 4, sunk into a hole filled with rocks and a small amount of ready-mix quickcrete.  We get a fair amount of wind up through the floodplain and didn't want to find a demolished structure amidst the raspberry bushes.  The arbor will serve dual purposes - a beautiful entry to what will be the Japanese garden, and supports for the raspberries wires which will run along the beds on either side.  

Cold work days

An unrelated selection of photos... this one above is the parsnip bed.  With each successive frost (nightly now) they droop a bit and with the wind, they're catching all the oak leaves.  I'm excited to dig these beauties as December comes along.  These are the first parsnips we've grown and I love the idea that they only improve as winter deepens - when all the other crops are finished.  Apparently the greens are edible, but we've not tried them yet as there are still plenty of greens in the garden and cold frames to satisfy us.  A friend came to help with the firewood this weekend and we tasted the sorrel and New Zealand spinach periodically as we worked, each of which was more tangy and sweet after the frosts.

A dehydrator special - Chili! - using up all the peppers from the garden, along with some pintos and onions, as well as tomatoes that we've been ripening in the garage.  We started with about half a bushel of green tomatoes at the last harvest in late September and more than half of them ripened within a week.  The rest are lingering, developing some rotten black spots (probably too cold?), but the chicks love the lycopene in any form.  The ones that do ripen well taste wonderful after a month without that sweet garden-fresh tomato flavor.

We wanted the neighbors to feel free to use our 'leaf corral' so we built something visible from the road.  The slats are from a nearby fence that fell down and are woven with twine to remain sturdy through the winds and snow accumulation.  We managed to collect more than 50 brown bags of leaves from our environs which we dumped into piles over this past weekend.  We have coffee grinds on the squash beds and these are each topped with lots of leaves.  The remainder of the leaves are in piles wherever we have space, ready for winterization of beds as well as mulch for the coming gardening season.

Conor is picking our two loveliest heads of broccoli from a seed blend of Fedco varieties.  Fresh broccoli takes so little time to steam, a fact which we often forget!  Two or three or four minutes is enough for these tender stalks.  There's one more big head, but the rest seem to have slowed growth with these ever-so-short days...

Winter Crops