Monday Harvest – 13th August 2012

I suspect the tone of my Monday Harvest posts is largely determined by the weather on the day I write them, and the good news is that today it was sunny.  So today I bring you a veritable feast of winter produce, or that’s the spin I’m putting on today’s collection of veg.

I’ll start with a winter favourite, or rather two winter favourites: cauliflower and broccoli:

Both went into a gado-gado I made tonight and may post about later this week.  This was my best cauli so far this year and I have two to go.   I am wondering if early planting was at least part of the reason behind my earlier failures.  Last year I planted fairly late and my cauli’s were pretty good so if I do decide to grow them again next year I certainly wont be putting them in too early.

I had friends over for dinner on Saturday and I cooked curries one of which was a saag made to a slightly adapted version of the saag posted on A Kindred Gardener.  These mustard greens went into it:

as did this silver beet (chard):

 We’ve had quite a bit of rain over the past week hence the volume of dirt on the leaves.  The saag was great, the mustard leaves make it quite pungent though so you would have to like their flavour to enjoy it but for me I found it a great variation on the chard saag I generally make.

I also harvested a few curry leaves and mint, not for the saag but for other curries I made on the weekend.

The peppers in the basket are a few mini Mama capsicums which have been slowly ripening over the winter.

Also slowly ripening over winter were these chillies:

I’m hoping the plants will start putting on new growth soon so I decided to harvest most (but not all) of their remaining fruit.  They still have a respectable amount of heat which is good.

I started harvesting my Easter Egg radishes this week:

I think they’re my favourite radish – nice flavour and great asthetic appeal.

My other first for the week was watercress.   Here is a little bit I used in a mixed salad, along with some lettuce I used in the same salad.  I use lettuce most days so I thought I post a picture of my standard daily, for sandwiches (rather than salads) harvest.  That’s it on the right.  Isn’t lettuce a wonderful vegetable?

Speaking of wonderful vegetables, Mr 2 and I decided to ferret around in the potato pots to see what else we could unearth.  This was largely to stop him from pulling up my coriander – a project he had just begun under the pretence of ‘weeding’…  Anyway here is what we found just under the surface of one of the pots.  Just enough for dinner.

And that was it for my harvests this week, but if you want more then head over to Daphne’s where the whole world of harvests comes together in one place.