An abundance of produce.

I am overwhelmed at the moment by the amount of produce coming out of the vegetable garden.  It's very hard to keep on top of it so I have been making full use of the freezer.

We covered our tomato plants this year and it has been the best crop we have ever had.  Rats are our biggest problem.

But then the fridge freezer died.  This is where I keep all our frozen produce.  Fortunately we have another freezer so it was easy enough to transfer everything to it.  The trouble is that I didn't notice that the freezer wasn't working for what could have been up to twelve hours so a lot of my frozen goods had thawed. A lot had to be tossed.

The electrician arrived first thing this morning and has declared that we need to replace all the freezer parts....fan and motor.  Fortunately it is still under warranty.

Electrician hard at work

Anyway, back to the problem of using up the abundance of produce from the garden.  I have zucchini, eggplant, cabbage, carrots, beans, peas, sweet potato, tomatoes, bokchoy and spinach all ripening at the same time.  

I picked all the beans, sliced and froze them.  The tomatoes have been made into relish and the cabbage and carrots I turned into freezer coleslaw and another batch of Kimchi.  The bokchoy, apart from being a great stirfry ingredient is also lovely sliced thinly and mixed with pine nuts and feta cheese and wrapped in filo pastry.  These have been frozen for a delicious evening nibble. The sweet potato gets sliced thinly, roasted and used for nachos (thanks Roz for that idea). The eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes I roasted with onions, garlic and herbs and then once it was nicely caramelised (almost burnt!) I pureed it into a delicious sauce to serve with pasta or over meatballs.

Freezer Coleslaw

As today is Meatless Monday I made up my own pasta recipe using whatever vegetables I had.  This happened to be Broad Beans (that had thawed after the freezer died), garden peas, broccoli that I chopped in the food processor and my pureed roasted vegetable sauce.  I squeezed in the juice of a lemon and added a handful of shredded mint.  I also added roasted pine nuts and mixed the whole lot together with orecchiette pasta and quite a bit of the pasta water.  It was delicious with a capital "D" but very filling.  No dinner for us tonight!

Lunch