Harvest Monday - a new harvest

I didn't think I'd taken many harvest pics, but looking back through the week has surprised me....I'd forgotten these from only a few days ago....

 

My first (and possibly last) Brussels sprouts. Quite small but very tasty....Jan even said how nice the flavour was. I just cooked them quickly in a little bit of boiling water, to keep in the flavour and goodness. They didn't need many outer leaves taking off either (which is good as there wouldn't have been much sprout left!).

I used up the last butternut squash this week, cubing and then roasting

I added some pumpkin seeds and freshly ground cumin seeds towards the end of the roasting too, yum. We had some of the squash as a side dish and made the rest into a soup with Nero kale from the plot....

....along with some of these chestnuts which I'd also roasted (shown here before roasting). I didn't get a photo of the finished soup but it was really tasty, all whizzed up. These were the last chestnuts, but they kept pretty well and we got several meals from them altogether.

I harvested quite a bit of kale from the plot this week (dwarf curly kale and Nero kale), and some more leeks, but didn't get any photos. I slow-cooked the leeks for a few hours with red lentils, a tin of tomatoes, onion, garlic, grated carrots and spiced with cinammon and ginger, adding in a small bag of purple basil pesto from the freezer towards the end...the last of the pesto too I think. Even before adding the pesto, the stew had turned a lovely dark colour. As with a lot of my meals it didn't look so good once it was dished out but sure tasted nice!

 

The corn salad did look good though...I still can't believe how easy this is just left to sow itself around the plot. I literally have carpets of it in places. My harvesting technique is to snip off whole plants just above soil level, (avoids disturbing the soil) then wash them all en masse, as it's a bit fiddly. I tip them all into a bowl of water, then swoosh each plant through the water a bit and then pinch off the bottom of the plant (which removes the lesser quality leaves and base of the plant where all the leaves meet, where the soil is hardest to clean out). This also separates each of the leaves, which I then keep in a glass bowl in the fridge so we can dip into it over the course of a few days making sandwiches etc.

So it seems to have been a week of some 'lasts' but also a first (Brussels sprouts)....what will this coming week bring (some very cold and rainy weather by the sounds of it!).

 

Thanks for reading, I'm linking in with Harvest Monday, kindly hosted by Michelle at From Seed to Table, over in California, for a few weeks.

 

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