Winter Vege Bag - Week 9
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.
This week we have:
Rocket (Ahoaho māra kai)
Potatoes (Mingiroa Farms)
Fennel (Common Property)
Red Cabbage (Common Property)
Microgreens or Shungiku (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Beetroot (Crooked Vege), Brocolli or Brocollini (Kai Ora Initiative)
Silverbeet or Radicchio
Vege highlights, tips & recipes
Shungiku
Shungiku is an edible chrysanthemum, harvested when the stalks are still young and tender. It’s a great cut and come-again crop, and if we stop harvesting for a while, it forms beautiful yellow and white flowers which look a bit like fried eggs. Sometimes chefs ask us for edible flowers so shungiku is a great dual-purpose crop for us!
Both the stalks and leaves can be eaten fresh in a salad, or cooked - added to soups, stir frys, or battered and deep fried as tempura. Flavours that go well are sesame, miso, soy sauce, vinegar, honey, chilli etc.
A key thing is not to overcook them! If you’re adding them to soups or stir frys, add them in near the end of cooking so they don’t develop a bitter taste and retain their bright green colour.
I made tempura shungiku for the first time last night and it was yum! A recommendations from one of our long time vege bag members. I just mixed some rice flour and water until I got a batter just a bit thinner than pancake batter, dipped the shungiku in the batter (it doesn’t need to be fully covered) and carefully dropped them into a pot of hot oil (I partially dipped one into the oil first to see if the oil was hot enough - you’ll know it’s hot enough if there’s some noisy popping and bubbling going on immediately upon dipping). I left it in the oil for 20 seconds or so and took it out and popped it onto a paper towel once it was stiff and crispy. Best eaten right away! (And beware of frying more than one or two at the same time, they get stuck together really easily, and adding too many to the hot oil at once can lower the oil temp).
There are lots of recipes out there for tempura batter, often with soda water, egg, potato starch, some even with vodka. By all means give those a go, but also know you can do a simple and economical version with just rice flour (maybe even regular wheat flour but I haven’t tried that) and tap water :)
Ka kite ano,
George
