Harvest Monday

Here I am coming in a little late for Harvest Monday. This week I noticed that one of my sweet dumpling squashes was starting to go a bit soft. Jan's been doing quite a lot of cooking recently and she was in charge of roasting these up. In fact she only used two of them, they give a really decent amount of food for something that looks quite small, so still one to go. The skin is fine to eat as well, which makes prepping them easier - just give the skin a clean first, then slice down following the curves for handy sized roasting portions, and scoop out the seeds.

I haven't been to the plot much recently (cold or rainy on my free days) but got a nice little harvest a few days ago - leeks, chard, corn salad and a pointy cabbage. I'm intending to make the cabbage into a coleslaw soon, hope it's still ok in the fridge.

The corn salad was used in sandwiches and the rest of the veggies went into a soup. Here's a piccie mid-prep. I'd already added the lovely dark green leek-tops to the pan. Nice to have a splash of colour from the chard too.

I've been trying to keep up with home-sprouting pulses regularly (particularly through the winter months when there's less fresh veggie around), and add a sprinkling to soups right at the end, so they stay fresh and crunchy. Adding a spoonful of brine solution from a previous ferment gives a bit of extra goodness and flavour too. This is a different soup from earlier in the week.

In addition to the sprouted pulses, I've been trying to up our general pulse intake too, and have been buying various dried packs of Hodmedods British-grown pulses, soaking them the day before we need them to save a bit of time. The dark reddy brown peas here are called carlin peas or brown badgers. They have a nutty fulsome flavour. Plus there's a recipe to use them in chocolate brownies, so it would be rude not to try, eh. I've been using their split peas a lot too (like in the soup pictured above), plus barley and quinoa flakes (which I add to my muesli mix).

We were given a new recipe book for Christmas, The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer, which is what's inspired Jan to do lots of cooking. So, many tasty meals, which need the oven on, perfect for these chilly evenings. She generally adapts the recipes a little bit, to make use of what we've got already. Here's a good chickpea-based one including my own grown beetroot (stored in the fridge up til now) and climbing beans from the freezer. 

Usually I write this blog in the evening but as I'm writing a day late, it's lovely and sunny out there at the moment so hopefully I'll get outside for a bit of fresh air later. 

Thanks for reading this week, I'm linking in as usual with Harvest Monday, kindly hosted this January by Michelle at From Seed to Table  Check out her blog to see what other people have been up to.

PS due to technical issues, this is now going out on weds, a mere two days late :D