Autumn Vege Bag - Week 3
As summer winds up (on the calendar, at least), we're starting to see a shift in the vege available. Chillis that we started nearly 6 months ago are finally getting picked, tomatoes are starting to slow down, and we're anxiously waiting for the first colour to show on the capsicums.
Carrots are finally back! Crooked Vege was meant to cover the carrot break in Jack's crop plan over the last few weeks, but we lost those beds to slug damage earlier in the summer. We plan as much as we can, but we're always at the whims of nature.
This week we have
Salad (from Ahoaho māra kai)
Zucchini (Ahoaho māra kai)
Carrots (Ahoaho māra kai)
Tomatoes or Aubergine (Ahoaho māra kai)
Beetroot or Fennel (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Shishito Chilli or herbs (basil, coriander, parsley or shungiku) (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Heirloom Tomatoes or Cherry Tomatoes (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Spinach or Tokyo Turnips (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Vege highlights and recipes
Shishito Chilli
Super excited to share these. Grilled shishito are often served as a snack alongside beer in Japan, and they're delicious.
Generally Shishito have a very mild heat, although it's a bit of a russian roulette - maybe 1 in 20 tends to be quite hot. I guess that's part of the fun.
You can use them like you would regular chilli (keeping in mind the unpredictable heat), but we really like them grilled or roasted until they blister and blacken slightly with a little bit of soy sauce & seaseme, or some lime and flaked salt. Here's a quick recipe with soy sauce, but you can be creative with it.
Tokyo Turnip
A lot of people say this variety has converted them into turnip lovers. Tokyo turnips are really sweet and buttery (our friend eats them like apples when he visits the farm). You can use them in a stir fry or curry (anywhere you might use a carrot, for example), but they're also great thinly sliced in a salad, grilled or barbequed. Here's an easy recipe for grilled turnips - we don't have dill currently, but you could replace that with any other herb.
Heirloom tomatoes
This week we've got the first of our Russian Persimmon tomatoes along with the Scoresby beefsteaks in the heirloom tom shares.
Russian Persimmon is our favourite heirloom. It's super tasty and has much higher levels of bioavailable lycopene than modern tomatoe varieties (yellow-orange heirloom varieties generally do).
Like many heirlooms, it's slower to fruit, has a lot of visual imperfections and is more prone to disease problems - this is why large commercial farms don't grow old varieties!
But some of these old varieties are much more delicious and nutrient dense than modern commercial varieties.
Russian Persimmon originally came from the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust in whanganui, via our Rotorua-based market garden-friend, Jenny Lux. We saved the seed last year, to slowly adapt the genetics to our climate and whenua.
The Heritage Food Crops Research Trust has done fascinating research on the bio-availability of lycopene in tomato varieties.
