Another wet and windy week gone by, with a short window of opportunity on Sunday to get down to the plot and pick up a few veggies.
This week, I picked a few more smallish leeks, cut down our one half-decent stem of (nevertheless still a bit small and manky) sprouts, and then grabbed a handful of crisp, fresh kale. I was hoping for some PSB as well, but I think the birds have been at it and there was nothing worth cutting. So it goes.
The leeks were sautéed in butter with mushrooms and went very well with yesterday’s sausage and mash. The kale will be added to tonight’s salmon pan fry, along with a few more of the seemingly never-ending mountain of last year’s pink fir apple spuds.
I also dug a jar of August 2015 runner bean chutney out of the fridge and enjoyed a dollop on my teatime bacon butty yesterday. I think I used this allrecipes.co.uk concoction. It’s very tasty, but a bit too sweet for me. I think next year – I’ll definitely be making it again – I’ll try Valentine Warner’s version from eatseasonably.co.uk, which has a lot less sugar in the mix.
This week’s Harvest Monday is hosted by its regular curator, Dave at Our Happy Acres.
8 replies on “Harvest Monday for February 8th 2016”
The kale sure is lovely, so fresh and green. I’m envious of your potato stash, since ours is running out right about now! And I’ve never heard of runner bean chutney before. It does sound like an interesting use for the beans if you have them. We’ve been known to sneak them in cookies and brownies occasionally, though not with the runner beans.
Cheers Dave! We deliberately over-planted potatoes last year to help clean up a patch of ground that was newly cleared. We still have a couple of sackfuls as a result, although some of them are sprouting madly (which oddly seems to improve the mash we make with them).
I’ve always done well with runner beans but last year was the first time I made chutney with them, rather than just freezing them. I also found out that dried runner beans are rather delicious in stews (properly pre-soaked of course).
I second the lovely kale – not a hole in sight. I’m assuming you keep them covered? Around here, if you don’t net them you’ll end up with kale stems instead of kale leaves in no time 🙂
They were covered with enviromesh earlier in the year in an effort to keep the whitefly at bay, but they’ve not been covered for a couple of months now – the enviromesh was in danger of disappearing in the high winds. We’ve been lucky though, not too much bird damage. The pigeons seem to prefer the PSB…
I can recommend Delia’s Runner Bean Chutney.
Cheers Richard, Google is finding me her spiced pickled runner beans – are those the ones you had in mind? (Her smoked tomato chutney looks rather good as well…)
We have to net our our brassicas as we have a whole flock of wood pigeons just waiting for us to leave the greens exposed so they can make a raid.
Oh aye, a vicious beggar, is your average pigeon. Always worth taking precautions against ’em.