Monday Harvest – 3rd Jun 2013

I made a Thai noodle dish for dinner tonight.  It used both kaffir lime leaves and lime juice.  The limes that grow well in my climate are Tahitian Limes.  They are a little milder than West Indian limes and their skin turns yellow when they ripen but otherwise they are pretty similar.  I have a dwarf tree that is doing well in a pot.

My noodle dish also used broccoli, chillies and Spring Onion.  The broccoli heads below are main heads from my Calabrese (Green Sprouting Broccoli).  The plants these came from have loads of side shoots developing and there will be plenty more coming now I have chopped their central flower heads.

The chillies I am harvesting at the moment are a mix of Birds Eye, Long Cayenne and Tobago Seasoning.  All 3 varieties still have many chillies setting and ripening on the plants so I think they will crop well into winter this year.  The pardons are also still setting fruit and I am still enjoying eating them.  Today’s lunch even included the much hyped 1 in 10 hot one (actually I think it was about 3 in 12 but still it was the first time I had had variations across the dish, previously they had either been all hot or all sweet).

After a ridiculous amount of rain on Friday night (75ml/3 inches) it wasn’t until Sunday that I got into the garden, everything was too sodden on Saturday to bother.  On Sunday though I decided to tidy up my pots but instead got side tracked and harvested my turmeric instead.  It looks very pale on the outside but inside it is a golden yellow colour.  I didn’t grow much turmeric this year but this bit is a reasonable yield being about 4 times the size of the original rhizome.  I broke a piece off to grow next season, the rest will become curry paste as soon as I harvest the lemongrass.

Finally I continued to pick lovely quantities of parsley.  This lot I used in an Ottolenghi recipe which saw cauliflower roasted with saffron, olives and sultanas.

And those were my photographed harvests for this week.  For more head over to Daphne’s Dandelions for this weeks harvesting fix.