Using the Harvest

This past Saturday, these greens (a combination of sorrel, sweet potato leaves, and Malabar spinach), with the addition of some frozen chopped spinach, became a spinach and cheese pie.

Did you know you can eat sweet potato leaves? They're a great spinach substitute. I collect the young leaves that still have a bit of shininess to them. When I'm using them in a recipe like this pie I quickly blanch them prior to making the pie filling. 

The crust is a basic Pâte Brisée but I skipped the sugar because I don't like the slightest hint of sweetness with a savory filling.  The filling is very similar to this one, but I added some mozzarella since I had it on hand. 

Preservation Proclamation

Friday evening I made a big pot of sorrel and potato soup from MizTrail's Easy Growing. It was excellent! Part of the issue with growing non-traditional honky foods is that I have to figure out a way to cook them and use them. Especially when they start coming in by the truck load. Note to self: having 3 sorrel plants for a family of 3 is more than plenty. Thanks in part to the potatoes, the soup was filling enough that it provided dinner for 2 (Mabel wasn't feeling experimental that night), Saturday's lunch for me, and a big enough batch for the freezer that we'll have dinner another night.

I spent a couple hours in the community garden on Saturday morning, first teaching a class (of 2!), then attacking the weeds* that had taken over. Currently the garden consists of 20 mounded rows, each 8' wide and 25' long. We've consistently had 3 people there working on Saturdays and 2 stalwarts who make it out a couple times during the week. Suffice to say, the uprooting of weeds has been much slower than the growth of new ones.


I brought some clear plastic to the garden to begin solarizing a couple of the beds. In return, I came home with a plastic grocery bag full of lamb's quarters, a giant cilantro plant that went to seed, and a bin of red wrigglers. Later in the afternoon I gave my own herb garden some TLC by giving one of the rosemary bushes a trim, uprooting and drying catnip (for our own use as tea), and dividing a few of my plants-gone -wild in preparation of unloading (errr...) giving them away.

This is actually a different batch of pesto than the cilantro pesto I made, 

but what can I say, it's Monday and I'm lazy.

To recap: we're now well stocked on rosemary infused oil, rosemary balsamic vinegar, cilantro oil, cilantro pesto, and coriander. I'm still deciding what to do with the lamb's quarters, we have a ton of lettuce to go through before I get to them.

All of this jabber is to get to the point of what my Mother's Day consisted of: preserving. Whether keeping herbs in oil, vinegar, or finding a way to freeze them, I've already got a nice stockpile and the summer growing season hasn't really started!

*Most of these weeds are edible, but we want more mainstream crops producing food for Friendship Trays.