Ah September. All the promises of spring’s abundance stretched like a cheap veneer over the cruel vagaries of winter, slapping back like a spiteful ex.
Managed to lose another year or two down the back of the couch again, but I’m relaunching my blog presence via a hastily cobbled together plan to document a year in pantry planning – let’s see if I manage to keep it up, in between all the rest of it.
Actual gardening aside, the food harvest and preservation side of things takes up a considerable chunk of my daily life, from planning to cooking and the inevitable excessive jar hoarding (side note, if someone put out a line of readily available replacement pop top lids to fit the majority of standard jar mouth sizes, they’d make a mint off people like me). So, here goes. Maybe it might inspire others to hoard jars and shove more things in them. Especially in this Costa Livage crisis.
Despite spring’s fickle promise of future abundance, pickings are quite lean for pantry staples so early in the growing season. This month I focused on doing something with the remaining cabbages before they went to seed. Because as usual I grew far too many and then was gripped by my standard spring brassica panic. I made my first ever batch of kim chi using wombok (roaring success, if I do say so myself), and a red cabbage sauerkraut with caraway and juniper (also delicious). Thanks to a lovely colleague for loaning me her fermenting crock.
Speaking of lovely communities, some neighbours were suffering a super surplus of lemons and gifted me a huge bag. Although I was tempted to make the same delicious sorbet that I made last time they had this problem, it’s too cold to be enjoying frosty desserts for a while yet, so instead made my first attempt at preserved lemons (looking forward to that in north-African inspired salads this summer), set aside some lemon ice cubes for the freezer, made lemon drizzle cake and a batch of lemon curd (which also helped take care of some of the excess eggs from a dear friend’s overly enthusiastic chickens).
Another side bar but I really do know a lot of delightfully lovely people. That’s the home-grown community for you though.
One thing that early spring does have in spades is green leafy crap. Bored with green leafy crap after months of winter greens? Too bad, nothing else is ready yet. This is where I get to batch-freezing. Steaming forest-sized harvests of kale, silverbeet and nettle, popping them into muffin tins to freeze in small blocks, and then storing them in freezer bags to add to future stews, casseroles, pies and pasta dishes. I also batch prepare and freeze a blend of wilted nettle and silverbeet, maybe with a dash of chickweed and dandelion leaf, for future spanakopita fillings. It’s one of my favourite recipes.
But speaking of forests, have you met my rhubarb? A crown of green stemmed rhubarb from someone’s old plant was one of the first additions to my garden when I bought my property nearly 10 years ago, and it’s been consistently expanding its dominion ever since. Despite it being a delicious addition to pies and crumble, there’s only so many one person can eat or fit in the freezer. However, it also makes a wonderful ‘shrub’ (a sweet and sour drink syrup) and I also stumbled on a tasty rhubarb sauce recipe for lamb kebabs last year, so I’ve now added a few bottles of shrub syrup in the pantry, some batches of sauce ready for BBQ season, plus – yes – some crumble in the freezer.
Back to the pickles for my final culinary escapades of the month. The beetroot has been slowly growing since autumn, they’re never huge by the time September rolls around as the winter chill curbs their enthusiasm, but there was enough to do a couple of jars of block-rocking fridge pickle beets.
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