Make Your Salads Come Alive With These Salad Dressing Recipes
thanks to our hoop house and unseasonably warm weather, we've had our best december harvest ever here in zone 5. today i'll share some of what we've harvested in december along with a number of recipes to give you a better idea of how we use our cold hardy crops in meals. to get things started, let's take a look at what's growing outside the hoop house. this will give you a better idea of the impact the hoop house is having on extending our growing season and increasing our harvests. as you can see, there is very little growing in unprotected areas of our garden.
though the weather has been very mild by chicago standards, it has been sever enough to kill most of our crops, including the cold hardy ones. we've had some snow and temps as low as 15 degrees fahrenheit or - 9 celcius. even so, some unprotected plants that i thought were goners a month ago are still hanging on. we continue to harvest these crops as needed for meals, and will harvest them all when the forecast calls for extreme cold or heavy snow. before moving back into the hoop house, let's take a look inside this low tunnel
to get a better sense of the benefits derived from a single layer of protection. clearly, the plants in this bed are faring better than those in unprotected areas. they’re less vulnerable to the cold and have never been buried in snow. even so, we’ve been harvesting these plants more aggressively than those in the hoop house, because, with just one layer of protection, they will be lost to the cold sooner. this bed is mostly dedicated to edible perennials, but as they die back from the cold, volunteer claytonia and mache will take their place
and continue to grow through the winter and produce harvests in late winter and early spring. now let's return to the hoop house, where we're growing a wide variety of crops under 2 layers of protection - the hoop house itself and the cold frames and low tunnels inside. with two layers of protection, the crops in the hoop house are thriving, and we haven’t lost a single plant to the cold, despite the fact we don’t use supplemental heat. the bed is absolutely loaded with edible perennials and self-sown annuals that come back year after year with very little effort on our part.
we also intentionally planted a number of crops including kale, collards, perpetual spinach, swiss chard, lettuce, spinach, and tatsoi. we harvested crops from inside the hoop house almost every day in december. there are so many crops growing here that i don’t want to bore you by listing them all in the video. instead, i’ll provide a complete list in the description below. to give you a better idea of how we use our cold hardy crops in meals, let's look at some of our december harvests and the meals we've made with them. i've provided links to all the recipes in the description below. of course, when people think mixed greens they often think salad.
we used this harvest of lettuce, kale, tree collards, endive, mustard greens, red veined sorrel, and dandelion greens to make this santa fe salad, which we modeled after a dish from our favorite vegetarian restaurant. it’s a great way to turn a salad into a meal and is very easy to make. start with a thin layer of tortilla chips, add mixed greens, black beans, corn, peas, avocado, and onion. then top it off with shredded cheddar cheese, salad dressing, and vegetarian barbecue. of course, if you’re not a vegetarian, you can use your favorite barbecue.
though we do eat a lot of salads, i want to emphasize that we use our cold hardy crops in a wide variety of dishes. here are just a few examples. we frequently add greens to pasta dishes. this dish includes perpetual spinach, dandelion greens, and garlic chives - all harvested in december. it also includes tomatoes, peppers, and garlic harvested earlier in year. the tomatoes were picked before our first frost, while still green,
and ripened in a paper bag. we also like to include greens in every meal, including breakfast. we added this harvest of swiss chard, perpetual spinach, mustard greens, red veined sorrel, and garlic chives to scrambled eggs, which we make with eggs, cottage cheese, and jalapeno pepper. we also use winter crops in soups. whole foods sells french sorrel for $2.99 for â¾ oz (19 g). but we grow perennial french sorrel for next to nothing.
we used this harvest to make french sorrel soup, which is tart and creamy and one of my wife’s favorites. and the winter garden isn't only about greens. there are a number of cold hardy root crops as well. we've already harvested all of our carrots and radishes, but there is still plenty of sunchokes to harvest. this sunchoke soup with pumpkin seeds is one of our favorite sunchoke recipes. it’s creamy, with a nutty flavor, and it’s easy to make. if you’ve never tried sunchokes before,
it’s a very good idea to start with a very small portion. some people have more difficulty than others digesting the inulin in sunchokes. we find that one bowl of this soup doesn’t cause any problems. and, finally, we use our cold hardy crops in a wide variety of international vegetarian dishes. we picked good king henry, french sorrel, dandelion greens, collards, kale, swiss chard, perpetual spinach, red veined sorrel and more to make saag paneer, which is one of our favorite indian dishes. i don’t know how authentic the dish is with this selection of greens,
but we absolutely loved it. i hope you enjoyed this look at some of what we harvested in december from our unheated zone 5 hoop house. please see the description below for links to all of the recipes featured and a complete list of everything we're currently growing in the winter garden. before closing, i'd like to wish you a happy new year and a bountiful harvest in 2016. please continue to watch for more images from our december garden. well, that's all for now. thank you very much for watching, and until next time remember you can change the world one yard at a time.
