I love growing stuff.
Actually, let me rephrase that: I love it when Cat and mamma grow stuff. I just do not have the patience.
However, I do enjoy taking care of the stuff that comes out of our vegetable patch. Right now, our cabbages are growing like weed, which means that there are plenty of greens to take care of. You see, before you get those perfect little heads of cabbage, the plant consists of a helluva lot of green leaves. Leaves that would usually go to waste in the "commercial" vegetable patch.
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| Fading out the background does not help - it still looks messy |
As we're making a bit of a sport of using EVERYTHING that we can, we are contantly on the lookout for new ways of using all parts of our produce. The cabbage leaves have so far ended up in our stir-fries (yum), our soups (yum), as a salad (not so yum, tasted too much of tree...), chicken feed (they were not too impressed), duck feed (they will eat pretty much anything), compost and cover material for the vegetable beds.
The latest experiment is
sauerkraut. I am slightly hesitent about it, as the leaves behave so differently from a mature cabbage. They are much drier and more fibrous, so I have to add a lot of water after packing it with salt. To get the fermentation process started faster, I added some
rejuvelac to it. Apparently, that did the trick, because less than 12 hours later, some of the jars have already started bubbling.
Interesting! If it tastes like crap in a week's time, I will just feed it to the running ducks, our little quacking garbage bins. Might have to portion it out carefully, or it might backfire. Would not want them to have the runs. Funny.
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| Green bubbles in a jar |
