What are You Eating from the Garden?

[digitS']

The final little Tiara cabbage, carrots and parsnips sliced, boiled and then fried …

These are all from the coolers that have spent about 75% of their days and 25% of their nights on the deck, outdoors. The remaining days and nights - they were in the utility room.

This has been the program for those carrots and parsnips since about the first of October when they came home from the garden. The cabbage had some time in the carport fridge before I decided that the outdoor temperatures would cause them to freeze and pulled the plug on that.

It will be a few more days before I dig anything out of the storage pit in the backyard garden .

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

i hope today we'll have some fresh baked squash since i plan to finish putting up the rest of what we have here stacked by the front door. it's quite a pile. luckily i have a good start on it already just by having them here in the house instead of out in the garage. Mom asks me if i'm going to save all the seeds, of course i will save some of them, but maybe not all of them, we'll see...

 

[Zeedman]

'Tis the time of the season... for experimentation. I mentioned once in the Bean Thread that I had several pounds of old yardlong bean seed, set aside when replaced with a new crop. Aside from one effort about 10 years ago (when I cooked some black-seeded yardlongs in a blackeyed pea recipe) I haven't used any of them. So I pulled out some red-seeded yardlong beans from 2014, and soaked them to see what would happen.

After soaking over-night, quite a few seeds had not expanded, so I gave them another 24 hours. Having once had the horrible experience of picking through cooked beans for "hard" seeds, I inspected these closely prior to cooking - and sorted out all of the hard seeds. This was the result:

2014 yardlong bean seed, after about 36 hours soaking

The expanded seeds, once cooked, were mostly normal, with only a few having a slightly harder than normal consistency. We seasoned them with butter, salt, and Thai basil. The hard seeds were thrown into the back yard to either be eaten or decompose naturally... but in a crisis, the hard beans could be re-dried & ground in a grain mill.

 

[flowerbug]

...but in a crisis, the hard beans could be re-dried & ground in a grain mill.

or throw them in a chili as a meat extender, the harder texture might reduce since you'd be cooking them for another few hours.

to me having a firm bean for chili is a plus. i have a bean i grow here on purpose for that reason alone. cook it for three hours and it doesn't fall apart. to the tooth. i just call it a Tan Goats Eye bean.

i thought you were going to try them as sprouts. 36hrs of soaking!

 

[flowerbug]

Mom made a few batches of chili, so in there were plenty of our canned chunks of tomatoes, tomato juice and garlic from the gardens. she also made some baked beans and also some bean soup with ham so we're well stocked for the next few weeks.

since she doesn't eat spicy foods of any kind the chili is a welcome change, she can't have any but i can and i made sure to have a few quarts set aside. breakfast chili. yesterday i had a few eggs on top of my chili for breakfast.

tex-mex chili style. today i had it plain. tomorrow i'll put some cheese on it. another day will be with sweet potato corn chips and the last batch i'll have with onion, cheese and mustard. variety is the spice of life.

 

[Phaedra]

A cheese omelette roll with microgreens

 

[ducks4you]

Pumpkin Pie, from one of my pie pumpkins!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Something about winter carrots fresh from the garden. They are shiny because they are wet.

 

[ducks4you]

SO jelly!!!

 

[flowerbug]

it seems that i think of pulling something from the freezer to eat while i'm over here on my perch, but as soon as i get up to make something in the kitchen i've forgotten. the other day Mom was getting some frozen blueberries out for making muffins and some slabs of squash came out too so i kept one of those out to thaw and eat. yum, i do good work.

also frozen cooked beans have been good eating the past few days.

i need to get some strawberries out and see how they're doing.