Lamb Roast with Cabbage and (very small) Parsnips

Last night I had another great feed involving food harvested from the garden.

This is such a great payback of growing your own because food really does just taste so much nicer when you have grown it yourself, and have watched it first poke through the earth and then slowly develop until it is ready for eating.

This time it involved the cabbage, and a few VERY early parsnips, one pulled to check the development of the crop, and the other two pulled accidentally while weeding.

The Bearded Bastard selecting leaves for dinner

Lifting leaves ready for eating

A shot of the cabbage leaves mid-harvest

Reading for chopping

I have the habit of removing the tough central stalk

I decided to slice these leaves into strips, ready for the steamer (10 mins only required for these)

The (tiny tiny) parsnips, fresh out of the ground

The washed and trimmed parsnips. I cooked these for about 5 mins in the roasting tin with the potatoes and lamb joint.

DINNER!!! Cabbage bottom left (obviously) and parsnip peaking out between the yorkshire pud top right and the tatty.

Can I just say that, tiny as they were, those parsnips really REALLY packed a punch. So sweet and so tasty. I can't wait for the rest of the harvest to come in.

The cabbage was a slight disappointment, not quite as tasty as the rest of the food which I have grown. It was nice though.

Right, a slight bonus for you here. Last night myself and the girlfriend went round the outside tomatoes and chillis and counted up the current harvest (there are more flowers ready to become fruit) and I drew the following diagram, with counts of fruit per plant, and a total at the bottom.

Yes, 111 tomatoes are currently going well in the garden.

Another (final) interesting point to observe is the two plants with 27 and 9 fruits on them were both runt plants which I almost threw away and just at the last minute pushed into the earth in the herb garden. So, however small and runty your seedling may be, give it a chance. That runt is now the most productive of them all.

Cheers