garden cookery

a portion of that sinkload of jerusalem artichoke i harvested out of the community garden yesterday have become part of today's lunch...actually last season's gardens provided two of the main ingredients..the red pontiac potatoes i used came from my back yard last autumn and have been stored in the basement ( separate from the seed potatoes )...i diced up the potatoes and peeled the sunchokes ( i used a technique i learned form "america's test kitchen"...when they were peeling ginger they used the edge of the concave side of a spoon to scrape the peel off rather than paring it off..jerusalem artichoke peels are reasonably thin and this worked really well...quicker and not nearly as much waste of tuber...i'm sold ) and precooked them...i boiled pasta to serve as a bed and added some reasonably fresh mushrooms and fresh parmesan cheese as well as a taste of cream of mushroom soup to help hold it together...thoroughly mixed and baked in a 400 degree ( fahrenheit ) oven for about 35 minutes...i foresee a tossed salad as a side and leftovers to pick over as the day goes on...so even march isn't off limits as far as cooking fresh from the garden if you grow a mixture of vegetables and root crops...i an strongly biased towards intercropping and a health mix of plants in any given bed...the one the sunchokes came out of had potatoes and tomatoes in it all through the season...that sort of mixing can extend the season almost to year round.