A Winter of Salads – Waldorf

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Liz

I went round to mum & dad’s for dinner last night, saw the magnificent celery they had growing in their garden and decided to make a Waldorf Salad.  Over dinner we were talking about salads and it seemed that whilst everyone knew the origins of the Waldorf Salad no one could think of another single salad they knew the history behind.  Personally I’m not sure whether we should attribute the fame of the salad to the reputation of the Waldorf-Astoria or to the popularity of Fawlty Towers  within my family but still….

I am posting about this salad as part of Vegplotting’s salad days series.  Not only am I late with my post but I’m not entirely convinced that a Waldorf Salad really fulfills the salad days brief as it lacks salad leaves pretty much completely.  In an attempt to create relevance I have photographed a portion of salad on one of my Freckles lettuce leaves but I suspect few will be convinced by the tenuous link.  In the Waldorf’s defence though all the ingredients are highly seasonal and are grown within Victoria so in that respect its the perfect early winter salad.

This is how I made our salad yesterday:

Waldorf Salad

  • 4 nice big sticks celery – chopped
  • 2 apples (I used pink lady) – chopped
  • a handful of walnuts
  • 3 spring onions  – finely chopped
  • juice of half a lemon ( I used a meyer lemon)
  • 1 – 2 tblspns mayonnaise (to taste)
  • Salt & pepper to taste

Combine the lemon juice & mayonnaise.  Mix it through the salad ingredients.  Season with salt & pepper to taste.  Eat.

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Posted in Fruits | Tagged | 22 Comments

Rhubarb Cake

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Liz

I want to get better at cooking with rhubarb.  I keep reading wonderful posts about cooking with it.  Doesn’t Masala Herb’s tart sound just amazing?  Her tart not withstanding though I often find that when I cook with rhubarb the finished product doesn’t always taste quite as good as I was expecting.  I have tried savoury dishes and sweet dishes but in the end I come back to enjoying it most when its simply stewed with sugar and a touch of lemon juice.

My most recent experiment with rhubarb is a good example of what I’m talking about.  I made a Rhubarb Cake.

Sure it was nice enough but did it distinguish itself from other cakes, well no, not really.  I have to admit that I did just take a Stephanie Alexander’s fabulous banana cake recipe and simply substitute the cup of mashed banana with a cup of sweetened stewed rhubarb but I was still expecting more –  More rhubarb flavour, more interest and more tang.  The end result although lovely, moist and cakey was just that: a moist, sweet cake with pretty much no discernable rhubarb flavour.  Perhaps if I had left the rhubarb in pieces the end result would have been more exciting…

So to all you rhubarb cooks out there what am I doing wrong?  What is the secret to cooking with rhubarb?  What are the best dishes and what doesn’t work as well?

I’m sharing this recipe on The Gardener of Eden’s Thursday Kitchen Cupboard , and Greenish Thumb’s Garden to Table where you should be able to find some lovely food.

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Top 5: Brassicas

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Liz

Vegetable gardening in Melbourne’s winter tends to be all about Brassicas, well Brassicas and alliums – but once you’ve planted your garlic and onions they just sit there slowly growing all winter and spring.  The brassicas though actually produce in winter, so in my mind they are what cool season gardening is all about.  Of the brassicas I have in the garden at the moment some are cropping and some are still growing.  This is what I am growing this year:

Calabrese broccoli, Romanesco broccoli, Year round cauliflower, Red express cabbage, Watermelon radishes, Horseradish, Watercress, Mustard, Tuscan Kale, Red Winter Kale, Chinese cabbage, & Pak Choi.

These are the ones that I find the most valuable:

1. Cauliflower

I love cauliflower, it may not have the glamour of say, broccoli, but I find it the most versatile to cook with.  Its great with spices, its fabulous roasted, delicious deep fried, it combines well with cheese and is lovely in salads.  What more could you want….actually it could be slightly easier to grow.  It can be a little temperamental and if it doesn’t have the right levels of food, water, and minerals then those lovely tightly packed white heads can be hard to achieve.  But I forgive it that – especially when I taste it deep fried with tahini sauce.

2. Broccoli/Calabrese

Broccoli/Calabrese is one of the great kitchen gardening crops.  I love eating cauliflower but I prefer growing broccoli – primarily because it just keeps on giving.  A good broccoli plant should keep giving you side shoots well after you’ve harvested the initial head, particularly if you are growing one of the sprouting broccoli/calabrese varieties.  Broccoli also tends to be quicker than some of the other brassicas (I’m thinking cabbage and cauliflower in particular here) which is a blessing for us impatient individuals.

3. Red Cabbage

Red Cabbage is a great crop, not only does it taste great but it also looks great in the garden.  I love the greeny/grey leaves contrasting with the purple veins of the young plants and then the beautiful deep reddy purple of the mature heads.  Yes it takes a long time to mature but at least it has the decency to look good while its doing it.

4. Watercress

It only recently occurred to me that watercress was a brassica, and frankly I consider it a minor miracle that I remembered that when I came to write this post.  I am a huge fan of watercress.  I love the peppery taste, I love that it grows vigorously in our winters, I love that it tolerates some shade and I love that you can eat it both raw and cooked.  Watercress salads are fabulous and it makes a mean soup.  All that and it is, apparently, very, very good for you indeed – check out the health benefits that Wikipedia lists.  What’s not to like?

5. Tuscan Kale

Tuscan style Kale’s are my favourite Kale varieties, I love the colour of the leaves as well as the texture they add in the garden.  They also taste great cooked.  My favourite way to cook Kale is in Caldo Verde and I find the Tuscan Kales work particularly well in that dish.

And that concludes this weeks Top 5.  Over at the New Good Life its her Top 5 One dish Wonders.

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Monday Harvest – 18 Jun 2012

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Liz

I feel like I’ve spent ages composing this post.  This is partially because my first draft somehow got lost in the cyberspace….damn you WordPress.  It is also partially because I’ve done two silly things today.  I’ve drunk slightly too much red wine with dinner and listened to altogether too much talk back radio whilst preparing dinner.  I do find that both red wine and talk back radio have the uncanny knack of both numbing the brain slightly whilst adding a slightly anxious edge to day to day life.  For me the anxious response to talk back radio is pretty immediate (do people really think like that????) but the red wine one is more delayed – generally striking sometime between 2:00 and 4:00am.  So with the prospect of some wakeful hours in the early morning ahead of me, I bring you the totally unrelated topic of this weeks harvests.

I harvested much of the remaining tamarillo crop this week.  I want to give the tree a good prune as I’m running out of washing line.  Its winter and things can take days to dry so I need to liberate some line from the tamarillo branches.  My spreadsheet suggests we’ve had about 200 tamarillos from the tree this year (with a few unreachable ones still remaining).  Last years harvest was under 10 so I reckon 200 is pretty good.

Also on the fruit front I harvested another couple of oranges.  My daughter decided one of them, along with a capsicum she picked, would be perfect in her camping chairs drink holder.  Why not I guess….

She did eventually eat it and the capsicum was stir fried with some beef and black bean sauce.  These spring onions went into that same stir fry.

Other greenery harvested this week included large quantities of parsley and a lot of silver beet.

This lot of silver beet went into a chicken saag which is the only dish I cook at the moment that the whole family happily eats.  Arrrggggh I live with too many picky eaters……

3 out of 4 will eat broccoli though so its a shame this head wasn’t bigger – I was going to pretend it was then I realised the presence of my finger in the photo ( I really must stop biting my fingernails….) gives you too much of an idea of its scale.  That is, pretty small really…

I also harvested a beetroot or two this week.  This one I made into a dip which although it tasted fine I found it very weird as its flesh was white.  My brain does tend to struggle computing a beetroot flavour with a white dip, no matter how good the flavour might be I still struggle with the concept.

My final harvest was to me my most exciting.  Parsley always excites me and I do enjoy lemon thyme but its clearly the Meyer Lemons that I’m talking about.  My first Meyer Lemons from my dwarf tree.  Hopefully the first of many.

And that’s it from me for this week, if, like me, you want to see more veg then head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions where you’ll find harvests from around the world.

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Posted in Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 48 Comments

Growing Horseradish in a Pot

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Liz

I’ve only been growing horseradish for a couple of years.  The first year I grew it in the ground.  That was last year.  I thought I harvested all of it but despite this I have spent much of this year weeding out horseradish shoots.  The problem with horseradish is that any bit of root left in the ground has the propensity to sprout, so when you dig it up to harvest it you are leaving lots of bits of broken bits of root in the ground, all of which can and will become plants if you let them.  Because they are roots they also spread quite widely, I had horseradish come up in the lawn, through the beds and some was quite a distant from the original plant.  The other difficulty in dealing with them is that poisoning them is fairly pointless as you only get that little piece of root and you have potentially hundreds more bits in the ground.  I found pulling off the leaves the easiest way of dealing with them, and as the season went on less and less appeared.  I will be interested to see if more come up this Spring.

Because of the invasive nature of the plant, I now, much more sensibly, grow horseradish in a pot.  This year I grew it in a 35cm diameter pot.  In retrospect I think it would have enjoyed a slightly larger pot as although the end product was fine the roots did escape the pot quite a bit.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plant this is what it looks like:

This was taken in Spring, by Autumn the plant was much larger.  At the end of Autumn the leaves die down and it is ready to be harvested and washed:

Before trimming off the smaller and hair like roots until you are left with roots of a workable size:

This is about 300 grams of horseradish which is enough for me to enjoy some freshly grated;  it makes a lovely dressing/sauce when combined with yoghurt (preferably Greek), lemon juice and a bit of garlic, and also to make a jar of preserved horseradish.

I put a few bits of root back into a pot (this time a 40cm diameter pot), for next years crop and there is very little I will do to it between now and harvesting next Autumn aside from ensuring it has sufficient water.  And that is horseradishes great attraction – because it is so vigorous it is virtually trouble free – although the slugs do seem to like the leaves.

Oh and while I’m on the subject of horseradish Dave from Dave’s Square foot garden provided this excellent piece of trivia in his comment after my Monday Harvest post:

“Decades ago horseradish was such a valuable crop (due to the large US German population) that there was a commodity market for it. Horseradish was bought and sold by the ton on the St. Louis Commodity Exchange which set the price of horseradish for the US.”

Isn’t that fascinating?  I still have to set a price for it on my spreadsheet perhaps I should write to the St Louis Commodity Exchange and see what they think.

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Posted in Herbs & Spices, Spring Planting, Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 52 Comments