From Garden To Plate

The best part of having a garden set up is enjoying your food fresh. Sometimes as fresh as it can possibly get.  If you're not going to cook it - why bother?  Be it rummaging around lunch time to quickly steam down something over rice, or cooking a main meal, there's very little that can trump it both in taste and satisfaction.
It can be fun too - my wife says it reminds her of Chopped when I come in with half handfulls of random things and say 'hey can you do anything with this?' - just as fun when I roll up my sleeves in the kitchen and cook up what I've grown myself.  I'm an adequate cook, though my skills reside in baking. I am always willing to give something a try, and keep trying till I get it right.

1/4 chicken with green beans and kale.

 Once the kids finally settled last night, we settled in to eat dinner. It was way past when I'd published the last post, and I had planned on some food posting today.  Beans and Kale were steamed in the chicken juices with some fresh garlic, and the Chicken was prepped with thyme, basil, and parsley.. all fresh.
The kale was quite nice - I hadn't tasted it before and thought it very tasty. I'd like to try it next by itself, to get a feel for where it's natural flavor lies (and by that get a better idea of where it fits in a meal).

Turnip greens were ready for the pull today, and my first trial was less than what I'd call successful. They tasted good but at some point I got a mouthful of something bitter as anything and it really left an unpleasant aftertaste for me.  My wife said it was alright, and the bitterness was part of the appeal, but I think she was being kind... In the language of my homeland I would describe the taste as fuck awful. I'd have to either fix it or just not grow them again.
Doing some yardwork for my wifes Grandma I brought up the subject, and between her and my Mother-in-law I got some good pointers.

1. Only use the larger leaves, and as little stem as possible
2. Drain off the greens after they have wilted (so if you're doing a more elaborate recipe - wilt them first)
3. Add some cider vinegar to your boiling water - a couple of teaspoons
4. Add some molasses or brown sugar to your boiling water (just 'a touch').

 So that huge pile of greens were washed and selectively cut down - the better sized roots (which had a zesty radish flavor) were cut down as well.  Water was boiled with a splash of apple cider vinegar I keep for my baking.
All the scraps were bagged up and put in the freezer - as I do with all garden and fruit scraps. A very important part of the process and worth reminding folks about.
Rather than thinking of the garden as dirt and plants - think of the entire system as a single unit. We want to keep it as closed and self functioning as we can - because we are conserving that energy, we don't want to be constantly topping it up.  If you have a bottle of milk you use what you need, right? Despite the old saying of  'crying over spilled milk' you don't just splash it over everything if you can help it.  It's a waste.  Same thing with the garden.  Just because we personally can't eat the offcuts, peels, or roots of something doesn't make them useless - giving as much of what isn't used as possible to the woms lets me put nutrients back into the soil as quickly as possible.  Nutrients that can be used to grow other things.  I don't look at those scraps as inedible - I look at them as my next pepper, tomato, or lettuce.  If we keep as much as we can within the whole system, we need to spend less time and money topping it up. 

Now back to our scheduled program:

I kept the greens recipe as basic as possible this time. I wanted to taste the greens by themselves, and determine if this was something I wanted to keep growing. 
The pile was overflowing my pot, but wilted down in about 20 minutes.  Greens were strained - the pot rinsed and restarted with salted water. Again a splash of vinegar was added, and I had no brown sugar or molasses - so a generous cap full of cane syrup was used.
The greens simmered after that for another 20 minutes as my wife was given a handful of other stuff from the garden - some peas, herbs, carrots. She started her loose shepherds pie.

As it turned out the greens were very nice, with an earthy taste similar to what you'd get from spinach, but not as strong as with swiss chard / silverbeet.  The sweetener of the cane syrup was undetectable and the bitterness was now replaced with a pleasant 'tang' that stayed with you. Actually it added to the shepherds pie I think, which was already very nice from the start.

Finishing out I baked a banana bread, as I had a few overripe bananas that were just right for the task... I might have a slice in a little bit - but it's going out to the farm with me tomorrow for Granny, as payment for her advice.

Meals fresh from the garden are a lot of fun in the kitchen. They can challenge you to try new things, enjoy some quality time in the kitchen with your significant other, and the food just plain tastes better.