Helen Lehndorf

Category: garden gluts

  • green bean serene

    Summer = season of green.

    Broad beans until we can’t face another broad bean.

    I divided up my monster stinging nettle plant and now I have baby nettles thriving away. (Anyone local want a nettle plant?) Nettles are a wonder herb and are seriously good for you – very high in iron, it also builds healthy blood cells and clears chest congestion, among other things. It also tastes great in soup – very savoury and iron-rich tasting.

    Green polka dot sundress with my green roman sandals. Welcome in summer, you’ve been a long time coming this year!

  • unexciting gluts

    Sometimes I end up with an unexciting glut in the garden. Recently it was silverbeet.

    A silverbeet glut is not like a tomato glut, or an apple glut – where your friends will get excited and happily take bagsful off your hands or you can make bulk delicious things like ketchup and apple sauce.

    I tried giving away some of my silverbeet and got either screwed-up faces or ‘No thanks, I’ve got lots of my own in the garden.’

    Poor old silverbeet.

    While it does freeze well – in the Manawatu I can grow silverbeet twelve months of the year, so I didn’t feel especially motivated to freeze what I know I will have on hand fresh. However, if you live somewhere with a snowy winter – there is an excellent photo-tutorial of how to prepare greens for freezing over on TEND BLOG HERE.

    I am, however, thrifty to the core and wasn’t going to let it go to waste – so I picked it all. It was a green supermarket bag absolutely chocka. Once cooked down, it was about twelve cups. That’s a lot of silverbeet.

    I love silverbeet, but it does have a strong iron flavour – so I thought, right, I’ll do something with it which will temper the iron flavour.

    I made a huge mixture of egg, strong cheese, fried onions, chopped olives and chopped sundried tomatoes – I figured the cheese and olives would be a good accompaniment to the strong flavour of the silverbeet. Then I made pies. And pies. And some more pies.

    I made four full sized pies and two dozen mini-pies. We ate one that day, and the rest I wrapped and  froze. The mini-pies have been great for taking to work for lunches.

    & that is the story of the great silverbeet glut of ’11.

  • peel the beet

    The garden is warming up to the point that some of the things which have been in it over the winter are starting to bolt.

    I harvested my beetroots the other day, as they’d been in there since autumn. Time to pick them to make room for some more exciting summer vegetable.

    Beetroots are great to have in the garden over winter because while they are growing you can pick the leaves off them and eat them as you would spinach. So by the time you come to harvest the roots, you’ve had months of greens off them as well – making them a very generous plant.

    People think beetroot is messy to prepare, but I’ve worked out that by doing it the following way – there is not a stain anywhere. Not even on my hands.

    Ignore all the recipe books which tell you that they are too hard to peel raw and that you should cook then peel. Cooking then peeling = MESS! & They are no harder to peel raw than a potato.

    Of course you don’t have to cook them – you can eat them raw, but I prefer them cooked as I’m not a huge fan of their uncooked dirt-like flavour.

    Helen’s No-Stain No-fuss Beetroot Preparation Method

    1. Fill the sink with warm water.

    2. Chop the leaves off the beetroots. Keep the tender leaves for eating, (leaves not in this recipe, put them in your fridge and eat them later!) discard the rougher ones.

    3. Throw the beetroots into the warm water. Using a potato peeler, peel the beetroots UNDER THE WATER. Check it out! No stains on your hands. Awesome.

    4. Cut the wet beetroots into appealing chunks. Throw into a pot.

    5. Fill the pot with 1/3 vinegar (I use white or cider), 2/3rds water, a teaspoon of salt and the spices of your choice. Because the beetroot is so plain and earthy tasting, I like to use strong flavours like a bit of curry powder, lemon zest, cloves and wholeseed mustard.

    6. Boil until the beetroots are just tender. Cool. Eat! They are great added to salads, sandwiches or just as a side-dish by themselves.

    (Because they are cooked in vinegar, what you don’t eat right away can be stored in the fridge in a container with a lid and will last a couple of weeks.)

    & Super-thrifty tip: when you have finished eating your beetroots, the juice can be used as a natural dye for cotton or wool or a food-colouring replacement for baking (you only need a drop or two, so the vinegar-taste won’t appear in your baking.)

    So there you go – that’s what I do with my beetroot! How do you like to eat beets?

    …& the beet goes on…(groan)…