Dear John,
I know we need more canning lids.
We may need more jars.
Sometime last week, I took the fennel stems, chopped them up, and put them in brine with a few sprigs of rosemary, replenishing our fridge supply of pickled fennel. On Memorial Day, I pulled out our apple stock bag from the freezer, tossed in the cherry pits we’d stashed in there too. Ended up with one batch of apple scrap jelly from the juice. Then I took the solids, pulled the cranberries from the back of the fridge, and now we have a chutney. Last night, I made Artichoke Relish that I’m labeling “Relish the Sun ’23.” That (plus a giant batch of sunchoke burgers assembled last week, now stocking the freezer) used up our sunchokes for the season.
Today’s Box
- Baby Fennel (+ bonus from the swap box)
- Collards
- French Breakfast Radishes
- Red Romaine Lettuce
- Red Scallions
Things in the fridge
- Strawberries
- Garlic Scapes
- Bok Choy
- Fennel
- Some bitter greens from the neighbors
- Red Leaf Lettuce, More greens from the neighbors
- Scallions, Green Garlic
- Hakurei Turnips
- Green plums
In the Garden
- Lettuce, gorgeous lettuce
- Radishes + their greens
- Turnips + their greens
- Calendula leaves, from the thinning
- Rosemary
- Oregano
- Dahlia bulbs
Open Preserves
- Preserved eggplant
- Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
- Pickled banana peppers
- Pickled banana peppers with oregano, garlic, and black pepper
- Pickled kale stems
- Pickled fennel stems
- Radish kimchi
- Green tomato chutney
- Tomatillo salsa
- Cran-kin kraut
- Cranapple chutney
- Probably still more uninventoried
Garden glimpse
New Saturday. New starts. We’ve added Gomphrena flowers and parsley and dill. Brought the cilantro home. Pulled some more calendula and passed them to another gardener to transplant. (By the way, the ones we transplanted to our house look great now that we’ve gotten some rain. I mean, look at that picture. Don’t you agree?) We came home and made a lunch of lettuce and turnips and thinned rainbow chard that were freshly picked.
Meals to consider
- Keeping lettuce soup on the list. Ditto the fennel casserole.
- I made a fennel pesto from the fronds that we ate on our sunchoke burgers. It was good. And worked really well thinned with yogurt and lemon juice as a salad dressing. Since we’re looking at a lot of lettuce and turnip and radish salads, maybe try making more of that.
- Collards, huh. I kinda want to make the Lee Brother’s collard grilled cheese sandwich, but their recipe calls for way more collards than we have. Still, I might end up going that way with them.
- Though, alternatively, I keep having a sense memory of a dish that involved some sort of greens rolled up. Spirals of greens. I think, maybe, it might possibly be the shanu chaats from Hut-K in Ann Arbor. Described as “Spiced crushed chickpeas rolled in colocasia leaves surrounded w/ mixture of baked multigrain papdi, topped w/ mixture of potatoes, peas & chickpea, hut-k special sauces & garnished w/ chickpea flour savories. Allergy information: contains wheat, chickpeas. Vegan.” (The restaurant is closed. I do not trust the internet to save this information for me.) I’m wondering how I can go from that to a collards dish.
- STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS UPDATE! I searched for colocasia and got a recipe for colocasia pinwheels. Which is getting absurdly close to my spiraly memory. Maybe this can happen after all.
- Otherwise, we need to cook some of these greens down. Serve with beans and be done for a day.
- Not a meal! But, I do want to try collecting and drying some of our calendula this season. Especially from in front of the house, it should be easy to get to. We have Resina Calendula, which is especially high in resin which is good for making the salves and oils and what have you. Apparently.
Love,
Sarah
Planning Inside The Box 