Spring Vege Bag - Week 8
Click on any vegetable that has a link to see previous posts with recipes and cooking tips. You can also browse and filter the whole vege bag archive by vegetable here.
This week we have:
Salad Mix (Ahoaho māra kai)
Silverbeet (Ahoaho māra kai & Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Pak Choi or Purple Carrots (Crooked Vege Ōtaki) - these are the last of our overwintered carrots (sown a good 6-8 months ago!) - the next carrots won’t be ready for another couple of months!
Microgreens (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Celery (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Brocolli (Live2Give Organics)
Beetroot (Live2give Organics)
Leeks (Live2give Organics)
Vege highlights/suggested uses
Pak Choi
Background
Sometimes people ask us what the difference between Pak Choi and Bok Choy is. In short, not much - the confusion in the naming comes from attempts to use our alphabet to spell the Cantonese and Mandarin names of this vegetable. We use “Pak Choi” out of habit - it was the name I first learnt for it when I first started growing. There’s a little more info on the name here.
Pak Choi has been a staple of Crooked Vege since we started in 2023. I think it may have even been the very first seeds we grew. In those earlier days, we were living in leaky caravans, without any income - we pretty much survived on Pak Choi through that first winter.
We’ve found it reliably grows well in our climate and soil through 10 months of the year. We don’t do too much of it for Ōtaki Vege Bags, as past feedback has told us its not a crowd favourite - but let us know if you’d like to see it more regularly!
Apparently there is a dearth of quality organically grown Pak Choi, because we always have a lot of demand for it through our wholesale work that supports the Ōtaki Vege Bag kaupapa - we’ve hand sown, transplanted, harvested, washed and packed about 50,000 of these lil guys over the last couple of years. Most of that goes out through the Live2Give Organics online shop (and their own vege box kaupapa), with the rest going to a few smaller retailers and restaurants.
It’s reliability in our systems, and the high demand for it has made it a super important crop for the financial feasibility of Crooked Vege. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Crooked Vege & Ōtaki Vege Bags might not exist without it.
Using it
Pak Choi is pretty versatile. It can be thrown into a salad (thinly sliced), used as a napa cabbage subsitute in kimchi, or used in brothy soups/stew/hot pot. Here’s a simple-enough recipe for a noodle soup with pak choi. We don’t have spring onions this week - substitute with the green tops of leeks, or forage the onion weed thats popping up everywhere. But please be conscious of where you forage onion weed - its delicious, but it is a weed in our ecosystem, and councils + property owners often spray it with herbicides that are far more toxic than glyphosate.
We think it shines best in a stir-fry. I’d recommend washing it well (dirt and the occasional slug likes to bury itself inside the layers), peeling the layers open, and cutting stripes across them. Slicing vertically creates a more stringy texture. I’d also recommend throwing pak choi in the pan toward the end of cooking - it’s nicest when it still has a bit of crunch.
Ka kite,
Jon
