Winter Vege Bag - Week 3
Click on any vegetable that has a link to see previous posts with recipes and cooking tips. You can also browse the filter the whole vege bag archive by vegetable here.
Surprise cucumbers! And the absolute final stragglers of summer..
Surprise cucumbers (only a few, arrive early if you want em)! We said cucumbers were done a few weeks back, which was already a much longer than average season. But we have a handful more - enough for 9 vege bag members this week. The plants are extremely sad looking with a lower light, cooler temps and wetter soil. But we hadn’t actually gotten around to pulling them out of the greenhouse and composting them. They came out yesterday for our (very late) final planting of Cavolo Nero (aka italian kale).
We’ve also got our final capsicums this week. They would probably have kept producing, albeit very slowly. We’ve never really “nailed” capsicums, and when we crunch the numbers on how much they produce vs how much greenhouse space cost us (we dismantled and rebuilt a 30 year old greenhouse, which was much much cheaper than buying a new one - but it was still a 5 figure project, with full time labour for several weeks), they maybe don’t make financial sense. But we love them, and its hard to quantify diversity and eating vege you love. These plants were started 9 months ago. We will probably try them again next year, and make a few changes (starting even earlier) to aim for a more productive season that makes financial sense.
This week we have
Lettuce or onions (from Ahoaho māra)
Mesculun mix (Ahoaho māra kai)
Cucumbers (x2) or Microgreens (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Capsicum (x2) (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Tokyo Turnips or Nappa Cabbage (Crooked Vege)
Cabbage or Celery (Live2Give Organics - Live2Give were introduced in week 1 if you’d like to read about them) or pumpkin (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Spuds (Ahoaho māra kai)
Vege highlights, tips & recipes
Mesculun and cabbage
Mesculun is obviously a great salad on its own (or mixed with lettuce and micros). But jacks mesculun mix is baby pak choi, baby mizuna and baby mustard. Which are all greens that lend themselves well to cooking!
So its a really versatile mix, that can be a salad, stir fries, braising, or even a curry.
When we have too many leafy greens coming off the farm, our go-to is to make a palak/saag curry or some sort of spin on the classic irish Colcannon (basically mashed potatoes, cabbage and any other greens, bacon, onion, garlic - here’s an example recipe that uses kale).
Saag recipe
Here’s a simple recipe I often use as a base. This recipe calls for mustard leaves, so the mesculun is a great substitute. I usually add some paneer, tofu, chicken or other vegetables.
In general, the recipes on Hebbar’s Kitchen blog are pretty good - just search “Saag” (which loosely means “greens” in Hindi) or “Palak” (spinach) for a bunch of variations.
A couple of notes about the saag recipe:
The slightly less common ingredients can be easily substituted. Garlic works well instead of asofoetida, and any frying oil or butter works for ghee. New World Ōtaki might carry ghee and asafoetida, but otherwise Sai Spice Superette at Paraparaumu beach has a great range of indian ingredients (it’s the only place I’ve seen fresh curry leaf in Kapiti - albeit imported from Fiji) - the couple who run it are lovely and very helpful.
The recipe uses a pressure cooker. I don’t own one, so I simply steam the greens before dropping into a sink of cold water (this preserves the strong green colour), before blending and cooking down with the spices and garlic. It’s also unlike you own a “kadai” - any pot or wok will work.
Colcannon - basically mashed potatoes with kale, bacon and onion/garlic. Here’s an example recipe.
Tokyo Turnips
Turnips get a bad rap. I think of overboiled, bland-yet-bitter, moosh, when I think of the way my parents occasionally cooked turnips growing up.
But we grow the tokyo variety, which is so much better - so sweet and buttery in texture you can eat them raw like an apple. I really like them thinly sliced in a salad, grilled or barbequed. Here's an easy recipe for grilled turnips (sub dill with other herbs, dried herbs, or microgreens).
You can use them in a stir fry or curry (anywhere you might use a carrot, for example), or simply roast them! They’re really juicy when roasted or grilled in large chunks.
Ka kite ano,
Jon
