After the fall harvest comes in, like many folks with gardens across North America, we hunker down and try to spend the cold months eating as consistently out of our farm pantry as we can. We do buy in some food — flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, black tea, and some dairy, as well as a bit of meat — but most of what we eat between October and May (winter in the North) comes from our garden. It’s not as crazy as it sounds! Yep, there are some days in late February when we look at the canning jars and wonder, "What were we thinking, making so many pickled beets?!" And yep, there are evenings toward the end of a long winter when our creativity buckles and it seems so much easier to go into town and order fast food. But usually all it takes is a quick "shopping trip" around the pantry shelves and the freezer, and we can come up with something tasty right from the garden.
For the friends who wonder how we live so many months of the year without buying in much, check out these delicious meals from the farm!
There’s always a pot of soup on the go during the cold months. Everything in this one came right from our garden (except that bay leaf!)
We love warming Thai Squash Soup. Check out the recipe we use here: Squash Soup
Pea and Kale Pesto is easy to whip up from frozen ingredients. If you grow some cut-and-come-again greens in a sunny window, this pasta dish can quickly become a full meal! (And nope, we didn’t grow the pine nuts, but we wish we did! Yum.)
If you can fish locally, these Fish Tacos are even easier. Here, I bet you can spot the ingredient we didn’t grow…
Birthdays can be pretty sweet events at Larch Grove. This fudgy Chocolate Beet Cake uses huge beets from the root cellar to keep the batter moist and give it a beautiful dark mahogany colour.