Monday, October 14, 2013

Produce - Big and Little

Andy and I have big appetites, so we love our veggies in giant proportions. Our favourite winter veggie in the garden is kale. It's getting to the time of year now that they are full of caterpillars. Andy is still happy to eat them, but I get a little grossed out at the idea. And on the weekend Andy cooked one, and it ended up in my bowl. That put my off my pasta.

But caterpillars aside, we prefer our kale to come in mountains, rather than the tiddly bunches you get in supermarkets.
Kale mountain.


Kale with cauliflower, jacket potatoes and corn cooked on the BBQ, and a tomato and cucumber salad

And when choosing a sweet potato at the market last week, Andy chose this gigantor. That's 2.4 kilos, or 5 pounds, of a single sweet potato.


Sweet potato chips with black bean burgers (recipe from Celebrate Vegan)
But sometimes we don't have as much success. We tried to grow a row of carrots, and they were pretty puny.
Tiddly carrots. We roasted them with Aloo Palak Pie.

And our corn grew really quickly and looked great, but was very small. Tasty, but tiny.

Not done yet. 


BBQ corn with pumpkin, potatoes and carrot, and Chickpea Pumpkin Seed Burgers (recipe from Let them eat vegan!)


The corn and carrots do prove that sometimes the smallest produce are the sweetest and tenderest. But we still love giants.


8 comments:

Amy said...

Nice! I think the carrots look mighty fine. We only seem to be successful with chillies!

Anonymous said...

I have never had luck with carrots, they always turn out tiny no matter how many 'grow big carrots!' bits of advice I follow!

Anonymous said...

Ha, I love that mountain of kale! Mmm.

Sandy said...

haha your Kale is awesome!
I can't get our kale to grow - don't know what i'm doing wrong :-(

Kari said...

That is my sort of sweet potato! Very impressive :) And I have had tiny demented carrots and odd corn too, so I think the size of things things can be a bit on the small side in home gardens. You're having huge success overall though!

Mel said...

Well done on the sweet potato - that is so impressive!

I would have been grossed out by the caterpillar too - my kale plants were harvested when they started to become infested with aphids and I had to wash the leaves so many times before I could think of cooking them. Your carrots remind me of my tiny ones, fingers crossed that I have better luck with corn this summer.

Kate said...

Wow your veggies look amazing!! We just started a little veggie patch but I don't think we will reach your standard!

Joey said...

Holy moly, I feel like I was looking at the lost world of vegetables with the kale and spuds - enormous!