Wednesday 1 July 2015

Dealing with excess salad crops

The sudden hot weather has brought on a lot of the salad crops. Lettuce particularly, which I could only deal with by giving away to those people helping us - some to the bloke letting us store boxes in his garage and some to the plumbers who are working hard all day to install our new boiler!

My husband wandered in with two cucumbers. It takes a week if you have a few slices each for lunch so I went for a different serving.
This is a whole cue, peeled, and sliced length ways with a potato peeler into strips, Discarding the seed core! It is then tossed in a dressing of olive oil, cider vinegar and sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. It is cool and delicious and a whole cue disappears in one sitting. Unfortunately it does not keep.

With the beetroot I have been grating some cooked bulbs up coarsely (messy I know) and then grating a freshly dug small red onion. This is dressed with olive oil and white wine vinegar, seasoned, with a few leaves of fresh thyme, slightly bruised.  This is even better the next day when the dressing has soaked in.

My garlic crop of 50 bulbs has had to be dug up.  The leaves all showed rust and as that spreads by spores getting into the ground we wanted to burn the tops asap. I put the bulbs upside down through the wooden slats of the greenhouse benches for a few days but then it got so hot they were going to end up cooked!
As they were dry now I trimmed the roots, rubbed off the dirt and shortened the stalk. I found a use (at last) for those annoying nets the supermarkets sell oranges in. I gathered a dozen garlic into two of these and when I find the garden string again (husband put it down somewhere) these can be hung under the stairs in the dark and cool.  I might look into making garlic puree with some of the crop later.

It was 34 C here today and not a lot of garden work got done really - besides being sweaty we found it hard to concentrate. Why on earth do people go abroad to seek out temperatures like this??? If only the plumber would hurry up we could go to the beach, but the poor chap spent several hours with a burner in a cupboard putting copper piping together.  They could not have worked harder and I felt guilty for sitting on the settee for 10 mins to rest while they toiled!


9 comments:

  1. Your garlic are fantastic. You certainly seem to have perfected the art of growing.

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    1. Years of practice! and accepting not all goes right! Our "Second early" red potatoes looked a bit scabby today but cooked as roasties extremely well.

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    1. Try grating a raw beetroot, it's less messy and tastes great in a salad.

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    2. Try grating a raw beetroot, it's less messy and tastes great in a salad.

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    3. I have never tried it raw. I will try that next time!

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  5. I love the sound of the cucumber recipe. I can buy them for 39p each at the moment in Aldi's. A few months ago I bought a spiralizer gadget off ebay. It looks kind of like a giant pencil sharpener and cost about £2.50 with free postage. It would make short work of that cucumber.

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