Autumn into early winter is a great time to find fresh savory salad greens. Arugula is still in the market now and mustard, mizuna, and cress are easily found from late autumn to early spring. Cultivated mushrooms, such as the portobello, are easy to find year round, but their peak natural season is fall and
Jicama, blueberries, roasted corn kernels, avocado, and romaine lettuce leaves The stark white flesh of jicama is cool and crunchy, perfect for eating out of hand after peeling. Jicama can be diced and added to fruit or green salads or speared and featured on dessert trays next to cantaloupe and pears and cheese cubes. Jicama
Radicchio with steamed beets, fresh orange slices, and black olives salad. Radicchio is a sharp-tasting cool-weather salad green that can be simply dressed with vinaigrette. It also can add a spicy note to mixed green salads dominated by milder salad greens. Radicchio is a type of leaf chicory that resembles a small redhead of lettuce
Table grapes are most popular for eating out of hand, but they can also be added to fruit salads or compotes and desserts on the savory side added to green salads, sauces, curries, stews, and stuffing or served alongside poultry, fish and seafood, and wild game. Grapes can be broadly categorized as either table grapes
Parsnips can be peeled, sliced, and sautéed or steamed like carrots. You can boil and mash them with butter and cream like potatoes. Parsnips can be cut into chunks and added to soups or stews or baked in the oven with meat stock and butter. Roast parsnips with beef, pork or chicken. You can parboil
Yellow potatoes are well suited for boiling, steaming, mashing, roasting, grilling, and au gratin dishes. ‘Yukon Gold’ is a stand-out yellow potato with a buttery-tasting flesh that you will want to try mashed, steamed, in soups and chowders, or made into potato pancakes. Because the ‘Yukon Gold’ brings its own buttery flavor to the table
Pea seedlings When the crocus and narcissus bloom, the soil is growing warm enough to begin working in the kitchen garden. And if you want a sure sign that winter in your area is past, look for the first leafing out of the birch trees and the bloom of the lilacs. Don’t rush spring if
Planting strawberries: strawberries can be grown from seed, seedlings, crowns, or runners. If the idea of serving your own fresh-picked strawberries next summer sounds good, spring is the time to get your strawberries growing. Strawberries are a perennial plant which means once you’ve got them in the ground you will have them for two or
The principal components of soil are minerals, organic matter, air, and water. The soil in your garden was created over thousands of years through the disintegration and decomposition of rock and organic matter. Temperature and rainfall, the life and death of plants, animals and bacteria and fungi, and the rocks that were there to begin
Arugula is pungently peppery and well matched to milder salad greens and endive. Certainly, you can serve juvenile arugula on its own. Arugula flowers bring the same peppery dash to a salad and some wonderful color as well. Arugula flowers are white pinwheels with burgundy center stripes and veins. You can use arugula flowers as
