Eat your garden, food prices are out of hand.

A good time to lose weight by buying less food from the market.

Now that I can grow cauliflower, I love it but didn’t grow enough to store. At the market, cauliflower is $2.00 a head before tax. It doesn’t seem like a lot of money. For $2, you get a perfect bleach white sans brown spots, misshaped florets, without one blemish, surrounded by plastic wrap.

When I see this seeming perfect produce, I think to myself what has to be done to get this head of cauliflower to market this perfect? I can only think “chemicals”. To grow that head of cauliflower, it needs fertilizer (chemicals), insecticide (chemicals), and then what? I suspect it’s sprayed with something then the wrapping itself is treated with something. It could all be harmless stuff, however not likely. I bought it anyway and it was nowhere close to the taste of the fresh out of the garden variety.

What we have on hand this February

Last week I made a “spinach” pie out of beet green and it was delicious. I stored the greens in both ziplock bags and containers The containers worked better. Freezing beet greens worked better for me than freezing spinach.

Greens – Frozen Beet Greens

Blanch the greens and put the in a freezer container. Let cool then freeze.

Spinach pie recipe

Follow and spinach pie recipe and replace the spinach

frozen beet greens (or spinach)

feta cheese

phyllo paster (comes frozen at the market)

dill

onion and/or scallions

Other herbs (use what you like) basil, parsley, mint

Brussels

we have lots of these frozen. Par boiled and put in ziplock bags. Flattened, cooled then frozen. These can be boiled, thrown into soup or roasted.

There are still some Brussels out in the snow-covered garden waiting for the deer to come get them

Pumpkin puree

This has been a success for a couple of years. I take two medium pumpkins (that’s what fits in my oven), split them, and lay them face down on parchment on lipped cookie sheets. After roasting and cooled, I scoop out the seeds (the seeds can be saved before roasting), put the scoops directly into a freezer bag. In addition I put the pulp in a blender and process to a puree. Lie them flat to cool, and freeze.

Pumpkin puree is used to make pumpkin bread.

Pumpkin bread recipe

One quart bag of pumpkin puree.

Three cups flour

3/4 cup warm water with one tablespoon of sugar and one tablespoon of bread yeast dissolved and kept warm till yeast multiplies.

Use a medium bowl. Add the water and pumpkin to the flour with a pinch of salt. Stir, add more flour as needed to make a ball. Knead for a few minutes, shape into a ball. Coat will olive oil all around the ball and inside of bowl. Cover with a towel and let sit till doubles.

Layout on a floured board. Knead a few times, work in more flour if needed til you get an ball of dough easy to roll out.

Roll the dough into a giant pancake shape, then start at one end and roll up into a log. Pinch the ends together so it looks like a baguette. Place on parchment on a cookie sheet. You can also make two smaller loafs and place them side by side on the cookie sheet,

Use a very sharp knife or razor and make two scores the length of the dough about an inch apart and 3/4 inch deep. Brush with melted butter and let rise. The warmer it is the faster it will rise. When it doubles put into a 350 degree oven for about 35 minutes – depending on the size of the loaf.

Tomatoes

I took some advice to just freeze paste tomatoes and the peels will easily come off. This is true. I have just a few bags of paste tomatoes but they were great in chilli.

Dried beans

First-year planting Good Mother Beans for drying. 7 plants 2.5 quarts. enough for a couple of meals.

Pickles, relish, pears, and jellies in cans.

A nice variety. I use the blackberry jam on my homemade yogurt. The relish goes into tuna salad. The pickles go with burgers and cookouts. The pears are like candy as we can only in honey and maple syrup. Goes great into jello if you like that kind of thing.

On the agenda for next year.

• Grow more cauliflower and freeze
• Grow beets and can
• Hope the weather is with us on the peaches (none this year due to too much rain and humidity, brown rot)
• Freeze more beet greens (left a bunch over winter, only time will tell what lies under the frost cover under 2 feet of snow, just hope its not a bunch of voles)
• Freeze more tomatoes, and grow more hogs heart paste.
• Can the pear while stil a little green (I wait too long to can pears and I always throw many away when they brown and the rest are really soft to peel and can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s February and we just made a spinach pie from stored beet greens.