Suburban Tomato

It felt like I didn’t actually harvest that much from the garden this week, but I do seem to have quite a few photos…strange….and none of them are of parsley…even stranger.  Actually I seem to be using more mint than parsley at the moment and I have also failed to photograph any mint at all – to be resolved next week.  What I did photograph was dill:

This I used in the dill and walnut tarator sauce I mentioned in my dill post.  In that post I said I didn’t think you could taste the dill but when I served it the next day, with some roast cauliflower I really enjoyed it, so I may yet post the recipe.

With the cauliflower & sauce we ate a salad containing both watercress and lettuce, amongst other things.

Actually I ate rather a lot of lettuce this week.  As well as using pick and come again varieties like the oak leaf above I also harvested a few hearting lettuces like this one which was eaten alongside some barbequed haloumi.

I did eat quite a few root vegetables from the garden this week:  Carrot, beetroot & radishes were all eaten in salads.  I also made a nice beetroot and apple relish to go alongside the aforementioned haloumi.

I felt like my kids hadn’t eaten nearly enough vegetables so I made a minestrone, this used carrots, leeks and celery from the garden.  I also added some finely shredded outer leaves from my purple cabbages that are taking too long to heart.

I’m getting really impatient with my broad beans this year – I have lovely tomato seedlings awaiting their place in the bed.  A friend of mine recommended nipping off the tips of the broad beans which she thought would get the plant to send its energy into pod production.  I nipped the tops off half to test the theory.  These I stir fried like any other fast cooking green.

My final harvest is not really my harvest at all although I did grow the items in question.  My daughter needed herbs for tea for her dolls.  She also needed herbs for medicine in her herb hospital.  Some were attatched to a large box, which I can’t quite remember the proposed purpose of.  This is one of her harvests that her little brother was very keen to sample.

For other fabulous harvests from round the world head over to Daphne’s Dandelions.

It was wet in Melbourne this week, very wet!  We had thunder, lightning, downpours, drizzle, rain and hail – you name it, if it comes from the sky and falls to earth we had it (accept for snow, but then we never have snow…).  As a result much of my harvesting consisted of mad dashes out to the veggie patch to quickly grab something to go into a meal.  I did photograph a few things though.  Broccoli, Beetroot leaves, garlic shoots (that my delightful son ‘helpfully’ liberated from the ground for me….) and coriander went into a stir fry to have with salmon.

Beetroot to make more room for my cabbages to grow and to go into rasam.

Celery to flavour stock.

And more celery for risotto.

Some leeks also for the risotto – note: beautiful worm which went back into the ground rather than into our rice.

And mint, yes I know that this mint is still connected to the plant and so is not harvested but I used a lot of mint this week (mainly in tea), and failed to photograph it, so I felt it should be represented.

Broccolli – 2 types: Purple Sprouting and Green Dragon.  Both were used in a pasta dish (with olives, chilli, bread crumbs and anchovies) and if I’m honest I couldn’t really discern any difference in flavour between the two varieties.

And finally to represent all the parsley I ate – 2 images of pretty much the same thing.  Two armed man.

And one armed man.

Actually my parsley is going to seed so I used less of it than usual, just in stock and salads.

For other Monday Harvests head over to Daphne’s Dandelions, you know you want to!