Spring Vege Bag - Week 13
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.
Final week of the “spring” Ōtaki Vege Bag season
We’ll be rolling straight through into “Summer.” A quick note on the “Spring” and “Summer” names - you’ll note they don’t really line up with anything in particular. The season name is a bit arbitrary, and simply a result of needing to give a name for the first 13 week season when we first launched the kaupapa. And then we just kept going.
Kia ora Sharon + matt
We’ve got some avocados this week from new Ōtaki avocado grower’s Sharon and Matt. I asked Sharon to introduce themselves:
We’re a local couple with a small avocado orchard. Planted in 2020, this is our second year harvesting fruit. We weren’t entirely sure how avocados would do here in Ōtaki, without the hot temperatures of places like Northland or the Bay of Plenty—but they’re thriving, and we absolutely love them!
You might notice some marks on the skins—these avocados are grown organically, with no sprays or chemicals. Inside, they’re creamy and delicious. Because they’re freshly picked and not stored, they may take a little longer to ripen.
As it happens, Sharon is also my old boss/friend’s Aunty, from my first farm-hand job at Kaitake Farm in taranaki.
This week we have:
Salad mix (Ahoaho māra kai)
Cucumbers (Ahoaho māra kai)
Radishes (Ahoaho māra kai & Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Parsley (Ahoaho māra kai) or Microgreens (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Zucchini (Crooked Vege Ōtaki) or Avocados (Sharon & Matt)
Pak Choi (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Celery (Live2Give Organics)
Spring Onions (Live2Give Organics)
Vege highlights + suggested uses:
Pak Choi
I’ve written previously about the importance of Pak Choi to Crooked Vege, here.
We don’t think any edible vege should be called “seconds” (unrealistic beauty standards for produce are a large driver of food waste! We produce enough kai in Aotearoa to feed 40+ million people, yet so many go hungry while “ugly” food rots in fields).
But this Pak Choi is, admittedly, pretty gnarly. A result of the recent weather and unusually high pest pressure for this time of year (and pest pressure increases in poor weather, as plant immune systems are challenged by environmental stressors). We’ve harvested the salvageable stuff, and you can take as much as you want.
This might be a good chance to make a Pak Choi based kimchi.
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.
