Harvest Monday - more greens and nettle soup

Brr it's turned a bit chilly here overnight, we've even had a few frosts this week. I earthed up my early potatoes yesterday, so they didn't get frost-burn. I hope also that all the strawberry flowers that have come out this week have survived. There's lots of flowers out on the other fruit bushes and my dwarf Apple trees too. Eep

I've started hardening off my squash and sweet corn plants. Luckily because my toms will stay in the lean-to they don't need hardening off.

So I thought I'd have another go at nettle soup, having made it for the first time ever last week. I used some mashed potatoes, carrot and leek from the freezer as the base like last week too.

Defrosting the mash concoction

I collected the nettles fromthe allotment and added them to the pan of potatoes, plus some vegetable stock, onion and garlic. Gloves are essential for handling these leaves!

As with a lot of greens, the leaves really reduce down once cooked

Because the potato was already cooked it only takes a few minutes for the nettle leaves to soften up. Then I whizzed it with a blender stick.

With some goats yogurt, mmm.

So in terms of texture, the nettles remind me a bit of mint leaves. Flavour wise, Jan described it as 'fresh'. I think you could use them with other veggies too and actually thought quinoa might be nice to add, or red lentils to thicken it up a bit.

Other harvests have been:

More kale shoots and purple sprouting broccoli. I thought I'd had the last of the PSB but spotted another plant growing right up against one that had hidden it until I went round the other side of the bed

We had these all with a wholemeal chickpea pie each on Friday night (alas, I did not make the pies!)

We've had a few leaves of corn salad and rocket. The corn salad is from a tub in the lean to, and rocket over-wintered in the back garden.

I've got quite a bit of overwintered chard

This lot went into a cauliflower and butter bean curry again one night

And kidney bean pasta sauce tonight, with plenty of left over overs for lunch the next day from each meal too

I might make nettle soup once more, whilst the leaves are young :)

In naturey news this week I found a huge toad under a pile of recently cut grass (it had moved when I went to take a pic the next day) and I saw a robin feeding it's mate with little grubs collected from where I'd just been working. They must have amazing eyesight to spot these things!

Here's some blueberry flowers to finish off. Hope the frost didn't get them!

Linking in with Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions

 

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