It’s January here and we are still harvesting from the garden on the West Coast of Canada. And everything is DELICIOUS!
Imagine going out to your garden to pick vegetable for dinner in January?
Now I know all of you living on the west coast are saying “big deal”, but after visiting my family on the mainland and seeing how frostbitten their garden was, mine is looking pretty good.
I was looking at some plants in my sisters garden that were all bent over and going mushy brown and asked what they were.
Turns out they were celery plants that had frozen.
I don’t mean to brag (well maybe just a little 🙂 ) but last fall I cut all my celery down to about an inch high and dehydrated it. Then I dug out the plants and transplanted them to another area of the garden so they were all together in one bed.
They are doing marvellously and new shoots are about 6 inches high already. I don’t think I will need to plant anymore for this year.
Right now I’m just trimming off the tops to use in jeanmakes sandwiches and soups.
But tonight, was a veggie night at the dinner table.
I looked in the fridge and as I haven’t been shopping for a while the only things in there were some cheese and sausage on a tray that Rob had brought back from an event, a cabbage and an onion.
So… getting out my trust instant pot (a Christmas present from my sister) I decided to see what could be made from the garden.
As you can see from the picture below, I still have parsnips, carrots, rutabagas, and one lonely little turnip. I left the dirt on them so you could see that I just picked them from the garden.
The large parsnip is around 4-5 lbs and I gouged it with the fork as I was trying to get its long root out of the ground.
They are so sweet and tasty at this time of year after the first frost and great in soups and stews or just roasted in the oven.
Everything that comes out of the garden is crisp and full of life. Nothing like what you get on the shelves at the grocery store.
I hosed off the veggies and just look at the colours. Like new pennies.
Then I brought them into the house and scrubbed the rest of the dirt off of them.
Finding a recipe for potatoes and cabbage I figured that I could do a little modification and add in some additional root vegetable as well.
Cutting everything into big chunks I cooked the potatoes, carrots, turnip and rutabaga for 4 minutes in the instant pot. I didn’t bother to peel any of them but just scrapped off the root hairs.
Did a quick release.
The vegetables were still firm at this point, but you could poke a fork into them with pressure.
At this time I added the chopped cabbage and onion (big pieces) and also threw some of the cut sausages on top and popped the lid back on and pressure cooked it for 2 minutes.
This left the cabbage still a little crunchy. If put in at the beginning, it would have been mush.
And the whole thing was yummy!
Which is a good thing as I filled up the pot and there is enough left for the next week! Good thing Rob likes leftovers.
