It is so good to eat fresh, healthful produce from our own garden once again!
Every day is a new culinary adventure, as we harvest and try new recipes…
Baby kale…baked kale chips are the family favorite, hands down…
A new crop for us this year…pak choy… What a versatile green! We’ve stir fried it with mushrooms, scapes, and peas and even added it to a curry! It adds crunch and a subtle flavor!
And this year, in addition to the awesome salad mix lettuce we plant, we put in a row of mild mesclun greens. Nice variety and beautiful, crunchy leaves!
And of course we’re enjoying a plentiful harvest of strawberries – packing some away in the freezer to enjoy midwinter in smoothies…making freezer jam (much fresher and more flavorful than traditional strawberry jam because it doesn’t require cooking the strawberries.)
And as if these weren’t delectable enough simply “just picked” – we had a bit of a splurge for dessert the other night!
This year we planted more garlic than ever…which at this time of the year means more garlic scapes than ever. Garlic scapes are the fruiting body of certain types of garlic plants that appear in June and, if not picked, will become seed bearing flowers on long green stalks that curl around. We normally chop these and use them in place of garlic this time of year, but we had so many that we wanted to make the most of them. We chopped some and flash froze them to save for winter recipes, but that becomes tedious.
So today we made garlic scape pesto!
We chopped them up into the food processor with a healthy dose of grated parmesan, salt, and of course, olive oil…
Blend it all up and you get a beautiful sauce that can be frozen or used immediately as a pasta sauce or added to any recipe that could use a bit of garlicky zing!
Are you hungry yet?!!
Morning Star Meadows Farm 