We occasionally eat wild fish and bacalhau is a favourite made from Norwegian dried cod that can be found in supermarkets here. More or less anything goes in bacalhau (bacalao) and although most people make it in the same way – layers of potato, fish, tomato and onions, often with chili – the Portuguese have hundreds of ways of preparing baccalao (dried cod). Being self-sufficient, detailed recipes aren¨’t useful and we use whatever is available at the moment. Winter is the time for stored bulbs, corms, tubers, rhizomes, and taproots. See below the picture for yesterday’s baccalao ingredients with 14 home grown below surface storage organs plus some greens (I’m pretty sure nobody else had this version of the dish…ever!): Oca (Oxalis tuberosa): yellow and red varieties Garlic / hvitløk (Allium sativum) Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) Potato / potet (Solanum tuberosum) – 2 varieties Jerusalem artichokes / jordskokk (Helianthus tuberosus) Parsnip / pastinakk (Pastinaca sativa) Scorzonera / scorsonerrot (Scorzonera hispanica) Common onion / kepaløk (Allium cepa) Cacomitl (Tigridia pavonia) Yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) Burdock / storborre (Arctium lappa) Madeira vine (Anredera cordifolia) Parsnip / pastinakk (Pastinaca sativa) shoots – had started shooting in the cellar Leaf beets / bladbete (Beta vulgaris var. flavescens) – 3 varieties Allium nutans (forced in the living room) plus (not home grown) organic tomatoes, olive oil and olives (I forgot the dandelion…will add tonight: we make enough that it lasts for several days….and the taste improves!)
With record temperatures recorded in this area at the moment after a mild winter when all the cold spells coincided with good snow cover means that the soil was hardly frozen all winter and garlic shoots had appeared a few days ago at least two weeks earlier than I’ve recorded before and I also found the first ground elder (skvallerkål) shoots – welcome back my friend and, be warned, I will be eating you until the autumn! It’s the marbled purple stripe garlic varieties that I grow that appear first: Aleksandra, Estonian Red, German Hardneck and Valdres!
The harbinger of the season of plenty: ground elder (skvallerkål), I LOVE YOU!I noticed Aleksandra garlic shoots on 13th March!This is a group of two year old garlic which were started from bulbilsGarlic being grown on an two year cycle can potentially give bigger total yield than if harvested every year. In the second year as shown here each clove has germinated and will produce a clump of garlics by autumn!
I started this week sprouting the first garlic bulbils of the winter. Of the garlic varieties I grow, Aleksandra, Estonian Red and Valdres are all very similar (I suspect they may be the same) have the perfect size and number of bulbils for sprouting. I counted 90 bulbils on one typical head this evening. They are planted on ordinary garden soil (picture) and covered with a few cm of sterile soil so that seeds in the soil don’t quickly appear. The pot is put in a kitchen window to sprout and the shoots can be harvested two or three times before they give up. Some people remove the scapes (flower stems) of hard neck garlic in summer to get a better yield. I have compared the size of garlic on plants with and without removing the scapes and found little or no difference here. I therefore leave the bulbils to develop on most of my plants. For me it maybe adds maybe 50% to the value of the plants, so more than compensates a small yield decrease! The only ones I remove are harvested for the scapes which are delicious in summer stir-fries.
Head of garlic Aleksandra
There were 90 bulbils in one head
Planted on garden soil
Mid-winter emerging delicious garlic sprouts (another year); moved outside for the contrast!
Summer harvest of garlic scapes (Aleksandra) are great in various stir-fry dishes or finely chopped in salad or in garic scape pesto
It took just a week for the first shoots of the garlic bulbils to appear. It’s mostly less than 16C in my living room where I have the pot.
Continuing my series of veggies harvested from the garden. this time used in a baccalao with parsnip (pastinakk), potato (potet), bulb onions .(kepaløk), Jerusalem artichokes (jordskokk), (bought) organic tomatoes and chili. Greens used from the garden: Urtcia dioica (nettles/brennesle) Aegopodium podograria (ground elder/skvallerkål) Hablitzia tamnoides (Caucasian spinach/stjernemelde) Rumex patientia (patience dock/hagesyre) Taraxacum officinale dandichokes (dandelion /løvetann) Ficaria verna (lesser celandine/vårkål) Allium sativum shoots (garlic/hvitløk)
I’ve never seen sprouting bulbils on hardnecked garlic before!
I’ve never seen sprouting bulbils on hardnecked garlic before!
Allium flavum
Allium hookeri var muliense
Allium cyaneum
Allium “Hammer” (Allium cernuum x stellatum?) This plant was found at Hammer Planteskole (nursery) in Stjørdal….I selected this one from Aliium cernuum sales plants as it looked different from the normal flowered plants
Allium “Hammer” (Allium cernuum x stellatum?) This plant was found at Hammer Planteskole (nursery) in Stjørdal….I selected this one from Aliium cernuum sales plants as it looked different from the normal flowered plants
A second Allium wallichii
This broad-leaved selection came from a seednmix of Allium senescens x nutans from Mark McDonough
Norrlands Onion (Norrlandløk) – Allium nutans x angulosum was found in gardens in northern Sweden in the 1970s (one of the 80 in my book)
