The joy of consuming your own produce
Fruits, salad and aromatics growing in my balcony.
If you follow me on Dan Pfeifer’s publication Gardening, Birding, and Outdoor Adventure you might know that this year I set myself to grow veggies in my -a New Year’s resolution that I actually did put to work!
And I’m already getting again that fantastic childhood feeling of eating what I’m growing.
Just last week I picked my first strawberries, from old plants that had been around my balcony as weeds for years, and this time I took care of:
Besides strawberries, in my balcony garden I grow lettuce, corn salad, tomatoes, basil, sage, and many other aromatics, all mixed with a few planted and several wildflowers, especially right now snapdragons:
Today’s lunch
Well today, I harvested corn salad for the first time in my life. I ate it many times, but I never grew it myself before.
I took 6 of the pots where I grow this salad, and just cut the leaves out:
They ended up like this:
And I got a basket full of salad:
I immediately rinsed the harvest, centrifuged it to remove excess water, and I already had half of it in a salad with cheese, oil, and vinegar (to me this needs no salt!). The rest went to the fridge for later, perhaps tomorrow or the day after.
The salad was very refreshing and delightful to eat. Not different from market-purchased salad, but with that extra taste of having grown it myself.
But that was just the starter. My main dish was some cappelletti with butter, sage and pepper. The sage was from the balcony too, this time the yellow one:
Eating this dish is even more special than the corn salad because I don’t find sage in the markets where I usually go. So I can only have this dish if I grow this plant myself -or I must specifically remember to go get sage somewhere else. And it is delicious, in fact, one of my favorites when I’m at an Italian restaurant!
For next time
Although I have some other corn salad plants growing up, mixed with these new lettuce plants:
I expect that the plants I cut today will regrow leaves, providing me with more salad over the summer and maybe even the fall if the weather remains warm. Just like this lettuce that I got in the market, which I planted after eating it -and look how big it is now one month later!
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