Baked goods

We made some courgette bread a couple of weeks ago. And good old rhubarb pie. Nice.

grated courgette
grated carrot
flour
water
yeast
salt
eggs, if you want
whatever floats your boat


Knead, rise, bake, eat.



 And finish off with some delicious rhubarb pie. Lovely.

Up close and personal

Some snacks we grew last year. 

Koolrabi

Boontjes

Aardbeitje

Young and old

Two of a kind

Compost

I’m trying to improve the soil fertility in our garden this year by working on the compost heap. We’ve got most kitchen scraps going into the little green bucket in the kitchen and once that gets full, it goes over to the compost heap at the garden. Surprising how much garbage actually comes from kitchen scraps. We also throw in the used coffee filters, dried leaves, and all the old plants from the garden at the end of the year.


Its been going since about October, so hopefully in a few months, we’ll have some good compost. Optimum soil conditions, here we come!

 Little green bucket --> big green bucket

Winter in Holland

Its winter in Holland. Lots of snow. Trains are running late. Cars drive at 50 km/h on the highways. The Fries up in the north are staring excitedly at their canals hoping for enough ice to skate on between 11 cities. Dogs get cold feet and have to lick their toes clean every 5 minutes. And the rest of us go walking through the meadow on Christmas day.

Return of the fungi

We grew our own shiitake mushrooms from a home-kit I bought at the organic grocery store. Pretty awesome.

I don’t even like mushrooms that much, but these ones tasted quite nice. My girlfriend really liked them and said they were some of the best she’d had. Super easy, tastes great, and they don’t come fresher than this!

Growing it in your kitchen is about as local as you can get.

Cheers.

Last year

The last season went was alright. Some things didn’t come out at all, like the melons, but some did much better than expected, like the celeriac. The weather was strange and unpredicatble. Unseasonably cold until June, it turned hot and dry in July. August was all rain, with summer returning in September and October.

Celeriac ('knolselderij' in Dutch) was a surprise hit. They weren’t super big, but all of them came out well and they required almost no work. Plus we were amazed at the versatility of this vegetable. Great soup ingredient, works great with mashed potatoes, good all-round filler. Highly recommended.

This year one of my goals is to produce some decent eggplants. The aubergines the last 2 years have been unimpressive. We’re going to start them earlier this year. Last year we had them out pretty late, also because of the weather, but it meant the fruit didn’t have as much time to mature.

And I’m going to try to get some good varieties of tomato going. It would be great to grow some cool heirlooms. Anything with some colour and taste.

The weekly harvest we had from July to September. More or less.

Cheers.

Vegephobia

I used to hate vegetables. The taste, the texture, the way they looked, No Thanks. Not just as a kid, but even into my teens and early twenties. I was proud of the fact that I would only eat large quantities of meat every night. At 16 I lived mostly from Wendy's Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers. When my mother cooked spaghetti with meat sauce, I used to remove all the onions from the sauce because I didn't like them. It's pretty sad actually. Salads were a total no-go. Much too green. Part of the problem was my own reluctance to try new things. In the end you convince yourself it won't taste good without even giving it a try. Years of fast-food and meat-and-potato nights followed. When I was a student I persuaded myself to try broccoli just because I realized that my own nutritional requirements weren't being met. So I finally had a vegetable, but that was where it stayed. 4 years of broccoli and meat. Good times.

Not that I couldn't cook. I consider myself a fairly decent cook and I'm not afraid to throw some flavours together. When you're living off of very few ingredients, you need to learn to cook, or you're going to be bored at every dinner. I could make some pretty mean meat-dishes in my day. But I still avoided the entire vegetable section at the grocery store.

Two things helped me change my mind about veggies. My vegetarian girlfriend and growing the food myself.  Also, backpacking through Australia for a year and thus being poor and hungry helped. I learned to eat pretty much anything in that year. I still really enjoy eating meat, but I’ve found a new trove of culinary delights by exploring what vegetarian food has to offer. And in terms of convenience its easier to go veg. We usually eat vegetarian dishes when we’re cooking together and I eat meat when she’s not around.

And I was amazed at all the good stuff out there. I slowly learned to enjoy most of the green growing things we can eat. They say you need to eat something 7 times before you start to like it. I think I can agree with that, more or less. I don't like everything right away, but it can grow on you, and with the right recipe can be totally awesome. Eggplant, I remember my utter disgust a few years ago, but now its one of my favorites. So much potential in one purple plant. And a good salad is definitely a standard during the summer.

2 yeas ago we decided to rent a small plot at the community-garden center in Arnhem, NL where we live. We had no experience, no prior interest in gardening, and no real idea what we were doing. But its definitely a lot of fun. We've been trail-and-error gardening for the last couple years and its turned out pretty well. Even with the minimal effort we put into it the first year, we had a decent harvest. Last year also went well, except the weather throughout the season was all over the place, and some garden pests also took their toll. But we tried some new things and worked on improving soil quality. This year we're hoping for another good season. Going for some new varieties and getting a bit more adventurous with what goes in the ground. This blog contains some stories about what’s growing and what kind of meals we're making it into.

Arnhem

Cheers.
de Tuinier