July 19
Leaf celery, also known as cutting celery. Looks a lot like parsley, you use the leaves more than the stems (like parsley); tastes like celery.
This week's harvest:
NEW: Cutting celery. First tomato! First summer squash!
ONGOING: Chard, kale, basil, carrot, red beets, gold potatoes.
THE LAST: Possibly the last snap peas. The flowers blooming during the hot week all fell off; the plants are putting out new growth and flowers but I don't know how long they will keep ahead of the weather.
The carrots this week are Red Core Chantenay, which are thought well of for growing big in any soil. We started with Coral, which are quick to harvest but never big, and some Yaya, which are a between-case.
Rond de Nice summer squash. Cook like any zucchini; or core and stuff them, they are so cute on the plate.
Storage notes:
Washed and unwashed: Some crops don't wash well or don't store well when wet, and those will be delivered OUTSIDE the big plastic bag. Basil and cilantro and peas, for instance, will be in a small plastic bag OUTSIDE the big plastic bag, because I think they will keep better this way. Rinse before eating.
Basil and cilantro keep best with their stems in water, like little bouquets, I find. Basil outside the fridge, cilantro in the coolest part of my house or the warmest part of my fridge.
Everything INSIDE the big plastic bag has been triple-washed and drip dried. Root veg should have their greens taken off; all greens like being cool and humid but not sitting in water. Potatoes need to be kept in the dark.
Recipe suggestions:
Cutting celery is also called leaf celery, because it's used for flavor from the leaves instead of texture from the stalks. Here's a discussion of leaf celery with a tomato sauce recipe, and a Greek recipe for potatoes and leaf celery. It looks halfway between big parsley and stalk celery.
An Irish beet and celery soup, from the cookbook Best of Irish Soups:
"Ingredients:
10 oz cooked beetroot
14 oz canned tomatoes
2 garlic cloves, crushed
4 oz onions, chopped
2 oz celery, chopped
1 tsp red wine vinegar
Half an ounce sugar
3.75 cups stock
1 oz. butter
Half pint of cream
Soften the onion and the celery in the melted butter over a low heat for 3-4 minutes. Add the tomatoes and the garlic and toss for 1 minute. Add the beetroot and the other ingredients, except the cream. Bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Process.
If you are using cream add it now, reheat but do not boil. If not adding cream, just add a little more stock or water (2/3 cup).
Garnish with grated carrot or garlic croutons."
Or: A Babylonian beet stew from about 2000 BC. This is an extreme case of, the older the recipe, the less precise... there are two ingredients that no-one knows how to translate. Tasting History made a version (YouTube); the recipe we have is:
"Tuhu beet broth. Lamb meat is used. Prepare water; add fat. Peel the vegetables. Add salt; beer; onion; arugula; coriander, samidu, cumin, and the beets. Assemble all the ingredients in the cooking vessel and add mashed leeks and garlic. Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander, and suhutinnu."
From The Oldest Cuisine in the World.
See last week for less scholarly beet recipes.
Getting ripe:
More tomatoes.
Parsley.
Molokhia, a hot-country green I'm trying for the first time.
The sweet corn is tasseling; still a long way from corn on the cob but a great sign:
