Beauty is in the frying pan! A sampling from the small cache of onions, potatoes (fingerlings), garlic, all pulled from the ground last summer, sitting since then in boxes and bags on the floor of a closet that could be called a pantry. Still firm and looking not really worse for the months of storage. There’s something extra satisfying about eating tasty food that’s been lying around, unrefrigerated, for several months!
Cooking & Eating
Early mini-harvest
A small harvest of spinach and bok choi for dinner! It’s always a pleasant little shock to taste the first of the season’s garden-fresh veggies. After the winter months when the only fresh produce is grown in faraway lands, it’s a treat. In recent years, I used to buy a limited amount of veggies in winter. Onions if I ran out of my own. Green onions. Sometimes cauliflower and broccoli. Salad mix. Nowadays, I freeze spinach, kale and cauliflower. That, along with stored beets, carrots, and winter squash, covers most of the winter. So, for food satisfaction, the first new harvests every year are a big deal! :)
Winter salad
This bowl of lettuces and kale is the first cut of spring, taken from the unheated greenhouse while snow flurries whip around outside. With the help of 6 mils of plastic and some row cover, the salad easily survived three months of winter, with temperatures that went down to -30°C (-22°F). The texture and color are good, the taste, deliciously bold. Fantastic! The flowers are bok choi that managed to bolt in the alternating warmth and cold—on sunny days, the hoophouse temperature could easily reach 10-15°C (50-59°F), even when it was sub-zero outside. Interesting!
Stored carrots for stew
Long-term veggie storage can get fairly involved, with root cellars, sticking things in piles of sand, adjusting humidity, spotting and culling the spoiled, that sort of thing, or it can be as simple as tossing a plastic bag of small carrots, little guys that wound up at the bottom of an empty market bin, into the fridge’s crisper drawer, and forgetting about them until they’re found four months later while rooting around for ingredients for stew. These carrots represent exactly the latter, a few handfuls of Nelson (orange), Red Samurai, and Purple Sun. They’re in perfect shape, crunchy and tasty—the plastic bag maintains the humidity that keeps them hard—so a quick rinse, chop-chop, and in they go. (They’re partly cut because I’d already started slicing them when I decided to take a pic.) Another whatever-veg-is-around beef stew. What could be simpler?!
Beef meets kale
Yes, yet another thing to do with KALE! In a small fit of inspiration, I tore up a few fistfuls of baby Red Russian, and tossed ’em into the pot with carrots, onions, grass-fed beef shank, salt, pepper, garlic and water, slow-cooked for quite a while, six hours or more, adding brown rice towards the end. Voila, Beef and Kale Stew. The kale contributes just a hint of seaweed taste, but maybe that’s just me. Anyhow, excellent. Will do again.
Fresh as it gets!
Continuing snowy white and frigid outside, and if it weren’t for the handy neighborhood supermarket, the last thing you’d be thinking about around here right now is fresh orange juice. The reality is, there’s plenty of it, legally speaking, at least: aseptic storage and flavor packs aside, fresh not frozen, not from concentrate, pulpy or pulp free OJ is in abundance, now as ever, and often on special, too!
More lunch salad
Yet another fresh farm lunch, from a long line I call the Endless Salad: harvested moments ago spinach, arugula, lettuces, topped with raw seeds and nuts, and an olive oil/balsamic vinegar dressing. Quick, simple, super tasty and energizing, all around amazing. Ashley does the honors…