…and it was not good. Cooked back yard slugs, no matter how talented the chef, do not escargot make. It was about a year ago that I chomped down on that cooked slug hidden in a side dish of chard and I believe it took me three or four days to eat again after that. Oh yuck! So make sure you inspect your greens well! Usually I find that gathering everything into the salad spinner, filling it with cold water and waiting about 10 minutes will bring any hiding slugs floating to the top. A good practice to get into the habit of during these rainy, slug filled days.
Enough about yucky slugs, how have your holidays been? What a fast month this has been. It has been all I can do to keep up with it all. Leading up to Christmas our days were long and full, but luckily once the big day hit, we’ve been able to sit and enjoy all those cookies that were baked, some spicy hot chocolate and tiny little Satsumas my mother-in-law grew just over at her house in Napa. Luckily these slow post Christmas days have allowed us to get back into the garden and sort things out. Adjusting to life with another baby and a crazy work-a-holic schedule has left the poor garden in a steady state of decline, but the past couple of days Scott has spent the entire days outside trying to tame that wild patch of weeds into something more respectable. Because it is time to prune and spray the fruit trees, he harvested whatever was growing in the vicinity of those trees, like these parsnips. Which got transformed into pureed parsnips and potatoes for our dinner tonight. We’ll turn the rest into parsnip chips (thin slices tossed in olive oil and s/p and roasted on cookie sheets at 375 degrees.)
The celery was pulled and made into cream of celery soup and the tops made into tonight’s salad along with a regular radish and a watermelon radish.
Strangely enough we had an artichoke growing and lucky us, it was time to pull the purple haze carrots, our favorite!
It has been so wonderful to see these things come into our kitchen and onto our dinner plate again. All fall we’d pick little bits and sprinkle them into our daily diets, but to have the past two days dinners consist almost entirely from our garden fare has been such a blessing. The seed catalogs have arrived and it is time to start dreaming and planning for 2011’s harvest.
Happy New Year!
A Sonoma Garden 