Category Archives: Garden

Sweet taters

While I’ve written quite a lot about our winter squash over the past couple of years, I’ve neglected the humble, but delicious, sweet potato.  While winter squash are great, they require scooping out the goop, and you often don’t know exactly what you’re going to get until you cook it.

In comparison, sweet potatoes require less prep, and they are consistently delicious.

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To give you a sense of scale, the knife in the sweet potato has a 6.5 inch blade.  This big guy weighed in at just under five pounds.  It really looked like it could have easily weighed ten pounds, but, while nice and solid, the flesh of a raw sweet potato is relatively dry.

We store them dirty (they keep better that way), so they all need a good bath and a bit of a scrub.  I soak the whole potatoes in a bowl of water to loosen the dirt, then use an old toothbrush to scrub them clean under a very small stream of running water.

Here are some smaller roots, immediately after harvest.  Matthew dug about 200 pounds of sweet potatoes from 10-12 plants last October.  These sustained shovel damage, so we used them immediately.

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The dry flesh of the raw sweet potato yields a rich, creamy product when cooked.  My favorite, easy prep method these days involves roasting.

roasted sweet potatoes

Recipe by Melissa

Ingredients
Sweet potatoes
Olive oil
Salt

Directions
Preheat the oven to about 400°F.*  Thoroughly clean the sweet potatoes, as described above.  Cut into similar size cubes (you can go smaller or larger depending on the final use, but similar size is important for even cooking).

Place the sweet potato cubes in a large, oven-safe, covered dish (I use a large Pyrex casserole) and toss with olive oil and salt.  Put the covered dish in the oven and roast the potatoes for 40-55 minutes, stirring halfway through.

Serve as a fabulous side dish, or toss into one-dish meals, soups, or wraps.  I often use sweet potatoes in place of carrots in this soup, and they substitute well in other recipes.

*Temperature is flexible +/- fifty degrees or so if you have other food that needs a specific temperature.   Roasting time may increase or decrease accordingly.

Bloody onions!

A few weeks ago, Matthew started onions and leeks in flats, and they’ve been happily growing under the grow lights in the basement.  However, the lack of real sunlight and fresh air led to some mold growth on the top of the soil, so with outside temperatures in the 50s, he planned to get them outside for some good old-fashioned UV light.

I decided to help with this on Tuesday, so mid-morning, after Gabriel and I returned from the gym/kids’ room, we headed to the basement.  With no way to carry the seedling flat and a baby at the same time (well, there would have been a way, but it would have required going upstairs for the Ergo carrier), I opted for the “set Sir down in the basement with a toy, grab a seed tray, and dash outside and right back in before he could get into any trouble” option.

Now, while Sir’s usual stair method involves both hands and feet, he has recently started experimenting with standing up and holding a railing and/or adult’s hand.  With the hands and feet method, he navigates stairs pretty well over ninety percent of the time, but we [almost] always spot him from below, because he is given to slipping every now and then.

Anyway, when I opened the side door that leads to the stairs down to the basement, Sir was on the second or third step (from the bottom), coming to see me.  He had been using the original [safe(r)] method, but right about the time I entered, he stood up straight on the step, all, “Look, Ma, no hands.”

After that, I’m not quite sure what happened — either he just lost his balance on his own, or I may, in my slight alarm at his position, have made a sudden move that led to the tumble.  Either way, the final result was a two or three step fall, ending on the concrete basement floor.  Not good.

I picked him up and checked his head, which seemed fine, and then attempted to check for equal and reactive pupils, when I noticed a decent bit of blood on both of us.  For a minute, I couldn’t determine the source of the blood.  I ruled out mouth (which was the culprit in a previous fall), head, and ears before discovering a good sized gash on his chin, right along his jaw bone.

I called Matthew for a phone consult on the use of steri-strips, which I applied with little success, contending with a crying, upset baby and a chin soaked with blood and drool.  With lunch and nap time fast approaching, I cleaned things up a bit more and slapped a bandage over the steri-strips.

We suspected that, especially with the location, the injury would need more than our first aid attempts, so I called and left a message for our pediatrician’s phone nurse.  Since the bleeding was more or less under control and Gabriel calmed down and ate lunch as usual, I decided to go ahead with his nap while waiting for the nurse’s return call.

The nurse suggested coming in to the office to see if they could glue the gash, cautioning that if the doctor determined that glue wouldn’t work, we would have to head to the ER for stitches anyway.  With the possibility of avoiding a much higher copay and the ER gauntlet, I took their last available appointment for the afternoon.

Long story short (well, still fairly long, but a bit shorter), the doctor used the glue-bond stuff, covered with a big, waterproof bandage to protect it from drool (because the glue needs to stay dry for the first 48 hours).  I admit to being dubious that it would hold, but now, over 48 hours later, it looks like we got off easy.

Still, the $25 doctor visit copay, not to mention the pain, tears, and angst (and the risk of a more serious injury) added significantly to the cost of this onion crop.  Needless to say, I’ve learned my lesson about leaving a toddler unattended, even for “just a second” — the onions weren’t worth the blood!

Makeshift root cellar

A root cellar ranks high on our garden-related wish list.  A well-designed root cellar would maintain temperatures and humidity ideal for storing much of the food we harvest in the summer and early fall and eat throughout the winter, including potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and squash.

Until we have a place of our own to garden and implement an “official” root cellar, we’re working with what we’ve got.  Until this year, that mainly involved basements — at Matthew’s mom’s house and at our apartment.  However, due to heat bleed-off from furnaces and duct work, most basements are actually warmer than ideal for root cellaring, and ours, with two (and in previous years, four) furnaces and duct work for two (or four) units is certainly no exception.

Once cold weather settled in for the season, we realized that the coldest place in our apartment was the front stairwell, just inside the front door.  We put a thermometer down there and discovered temperatures in the mid-50s (versus the 60-some-degree basement).

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While it’s not the most elegant storage solution, the space we’re using is more or less behind the door, so it’s out of the way.

The crate is full of potatoes, covered to prevent light damage.  It’s important to go through and de-eye the potatoes every couple of weeks.  We’ve had some that store better than others, but even the ones with rather shriveled skins taste good, they’re just a bit more work to clean.

The sweet potatoes at our place are a few steps up, in paper bags, though the bulk of our harvest of sweet potatoes and squash is still out at my MIL’s.

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We bought a bushel (about 50 pounds) of organic apples on our way to Iowa for Thanksgiving.  While they would keep better at cooler temps (like in the super-insulated straw bale building at the orchard), this was an okay compromise — there was no way we could fit them in the refrigerator.  Gabriel will often walk in the door, pick up an apple from the box, and take a bite, clearly indicating what he would like for a snack.

We’ve eaten or dried many of the apples.  The remaining apples have good flavor, but the texture is definitely best for cooking or drying at this point.

When we discovered our uninvited guests (of which we just found another a few days ago, argh!), I feared that they would be all too happy to invade our “root cellar,” but that hasn’t been the case (knock on wood).

All three Browns said bleck and frowned

While we harvested an abundance of some squash (i.e., tomatoes and squash), there were many others where we just had enough for enjoying fresh.  For a couple of weeks over the summer, we feasted on delicious edamame — simply steamed in the pod, popped out, and lightly salted (optional).  The flavor was so fresh, with a sweetness reminiscent of sweet corn, distinct from edamame I’ve eaten in the past.

Gabriel enjoyed it just as much as we did, and it was a great way to round out his meals.

While we had enough that we could have frozen a couple of bags, we opted to just enjoy it fresh, saving ourselves the work and reserving the freezer space for other produce.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a dish using frozen store-bought edamame (the same variety we’ve used in the past) and, wow, was it flavorless!  We all had the same disappointed reaction, remembering the homegrown deliciousness.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the page in Tippy-Toe Chick, GO!, one of Gabriel’s favorite books, where the chicks react to the news that they have to wait for chicken feed instead of eating “sweet itty-bitty beans and potato bugs” in the garden:

All three chicks said, “Bleck!” and frowned.

That’s how these three chicks feel about store-bought edamame these days.  Even though it’s months away, we’re all eagerly awaiting next summer’s harvest.

 

Sold on squash

When all was said and done, this year’s [winter] squash harvest topped 800 pounds.  That’s a lot of squash.

This picture shows the portion that Matthew harvested fully ripe.  We have this much again that should ripen and be good for eating down the road (though perhaps a bit less flavorful than the fully vine-ripened).

We also sold a total of 250 pounds of the squash harvest to Local Harvest Grocery and Five Bistro, so if you want a taste . . . .

The [modest] profit helps cover some of the costs that go into the garden every year, including seeds, straw for mulch, and soil amendments.  (Though we’ve played around with the idea of growing food for a living, I can’t imagine how much you’d actually have to grow to support yourself.)

The remaining squash leaves us with a decent bit to use throughout the next several months.  Fortunately, we like squash, and it’s really quite versatile: roasted and served as a savory or sweet side dish; cooked and pureed to make soup, custard, or pumpkin bread; cubed or diced and used in place of carrots in soups, stews, and other one-dish meals.  And don’t forget chocolate pumpkin cake!

With the cooler temps, I’m really enjoying excuses to turn on the oven (a complete one-eighty from my summer behavior of avoiding it at all costs).  If the oven will be on anyway, roasting a squash is an easy way to make use of the heat, since they can cook at whatever temperature you’re using for other recipes, as long as it’s in the 350°-450°F range.  Coconut oil is the secret ingredient.

quick roasted squash side

Pseudo-recipe by Melissa

Grab a squash, slice it, rub the slices with coconut oil, and sprinkle with salt if desired.  Lay slices flat in a single layer on a rimmed baking tray.   Bake for 15-25 minutes (depending on thickness of slices) at 350°-450°F, then flip each slice and bake for 10-20 additional minutes, until they reach desired tenderness.  Serve as is, or dress up with spices and herbs of your choice.