Wednesday, October 29, 2008

My first ever broad bean harvest


Way back a few months ago I planted some teeny tiny seeds in my new veggie patch. I have never grown broad beans before so had no idea what to expect. In the photos you can see they did very well & towered over Chloe. The beans in the photos are at about the time I picked my first batch which it turned out still had a way to go. The beans were still quite small & there was not much yield for all of the hard work of double podding, yet they were still too big to eat after only one podding as they had formed the tough bitter outer skin already. For example I used 500g one day to make some broad bean fritters, I halved the recipe & was still supposed to get about 8 yet after all my work ended up with one measly (though delicious) fritter!

A couple of weeks later & we had already moved out to my mums when I picked most of the rest which were now quite big. I had over 5kgs of the beauties. I used some fresh in salads, some simply blanched, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice & herbs served with fish, some in this lovely fresh pasta pictured, more on a delicious bruschetta and then single podded & froze a few for future use. I love them & even though my mum & some others cant see how I can be bothered, I think it’s a labour of love & enjoy sitting down quietly podding away, the end result of eating something so fresh & wholesome from your own garden is definitely worth it for me.

In front of the beans you can see I am growing some leeks, when I planted them I had no idea they took 9 months to grow, so will be keeping my eye on them when I do my weekly inspections of the works to the house, cant wait to start cooking them all up too & have my eye on heaps of delish looking recipes as well as some old faves waiting to be recreated. Also pictured to the right are some beets which were delicious & have already finished off all of the sugar snap & snow peas, not bad for my first crop me thinks. Cant wait to move back in & start the next batch, I still have a whole world of summer veg to experiment with.