Winter Meals from the Garden: Steak and Rutabaga Pasty

Since the 2020 garden was a big of a last-minute endeavor once I realized I would be home for the season, it was planted with whatever seeds I had on hand plus some transplants from a local greenhouse. Some of the oldest seed I planted was rutabaga. Specifically, the Joan variety. I seeded it heavily, expecting sparse germination, but I shouldn't have worried. After finally showing the overcrowded plants some mercy in mid-summer and thinning them to allow for more space to grow, they produced abundantly.

I left them in the ground until Halloween, ensuring they were touched by a few frosts. I harvested a variety of sizes, from a few fingers wide to larger than a softball. This was the largest.

After trimming and weighing them all, I had just over 20 pounds of rutabagas. They've been keeping wonderfully in an auxiliary fridge; I still probably have about half of them left and should pick up the pace. We've had plenty of mashed rutabaga with roasted meet, a bit of fermented rutabaga kraut, and a new favorite, steak and rutabaga pasty.

I'd never made pasties before 2020, but they're a delicious meal that can be made completely out of ingredients in our freezer and pantry. We've enjoyed them about once a month since November and I think they're permanently in our winter meal plan rotation at this point.

The recipe is out of a well-worn cookbook I've had for over a decade, From Asparagus to Zucchini. It's my go-to reference when I'm trying to determine how to prepare or store a specific vegetable. It contains a full three pages of rutabaga recipes (reflecting its Wisconsin roots), but I'll admit I stopped trying recipes once I stumbled upon this one. The recipe make six full-size pasties and there are just two of us, but we find that the leftover disappear rather quickly for subsequent lunches or dinners. We simply place the baked, refrigerated pasties on some parchment and heat them at 350 degrees until they're warm, about 15-20 minutes.

Steak and Rutabaga Pasties

Source: From Asparagus to Zucchini

Makes 6 large pasties

Crust Ingredients

• 3 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup chilled shortening or lard, cut into pieces (I use the lard rendered from our whole hog)
• 1 egg
• Ice water

Whisk flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut in shortening or lard with pastry cutter or two knives until the pieces are no larger than peas (honestly, I just use my hands to work the fat into the flour). Break the egg into a liquid measuring cup and add enough ice water to make 1 cup. Mix egg and water, then add to flour. Toss lightly with a fork (or your hands) until dough forms. Cover and chill the dough at least 1 hour.

Filling Ingredients

• 1 1/2 pounds cubed sirloin (I don't measure this exactly; I just use a sirloin steak from our beef in the freezer)
• 4 cups diced rutabaga
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 3 tablespoons heavy cream (if I didn't have cream I'd probably consider substituting sour cream)
• 4-6 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley (I use 2 tablespoons dried)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small pieces

To make filling, combine all the ingredients except the butter.

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper. 

Lightly flour a large work surface (you need plenty of room). Divide the dough into six equal portions (they'll weigh about 135 grams). Shape each portion in a ball, then roll it out with a floured rolling pin to an 8-inch round (I no longer measure this; they need to be fairly large, but not too thin. Make sure you can pick up the round and move it). Divide the filling equally among the rounds, placing filling on half of each round. Scatter the butter pieces over the filling. Fold dough over the filling, using extra flour on your fingers to prevent sticking. Press to seal the edges, then fold small sections of the dough to make a rope-like edge (You may think there's too much dough here, but there isn't. Just keep going and try to make the edge even.) Place pasties on pans (I suggest using a dough scraper or large spatula to move them). Cut a small slit into the top of each.

Bake 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 375 degrees and continue to bake until golden brown and fully cooked, 35-40 minutes. Serve pasties with salsa, catsup, or beef gravy. (I think they're also delicious on their own.)

September Notes

A post with no pictures. Imagine that.

September has been a heavy month in my mind. Wisconsin's COVID-19 cases keep rising (daily case are nearly 10x what they were when we had the stay at home order), the politics surrounding the presidential election are ugly, I see systemic racism around every corner, yet I still have a job to do, a household to contribute to, and a garden to care for. I haven't felt like taking the time to blog about harvests, though. Here's a summary of the month's happenings, for posterity.

As September nears its ends, my tomatoes are still producing (mostly Juliets, although there are a few straggler Celebrities), peppers are doing wonderful, and I finally got my first ripe banana melon. I'll consider growing the banana melon again; it's the perfect size to use a melon baller, making the serving easy. Mine tasted like a mild, floral cantaloupe. I suspect the flavor would be more concentrated if I watered it more regularly. I've harvested carrots and the first rutabaga for roasting—the carrots are gorgeous, and I'll wait for the first frost or two to kiss the rest of the rutabaga. Some celery was harvested for pork stock I made.

I roasted the first few red kuri squash, which have been curing for about a month. I didn't realize the skin of this winter squash would be both edible and delicious. It's a nice, easy roaster. Also harvested my one and only butternut squash, which has now been curing for a week. Usually I have them in abundance; either my seed was too old or the area I planted it in was too shady.

Cooking and preserving has been in high gear. I canned 7 quarts of beets from the garden, continued to make and freeze or eat tomato sauce (some of which joined some Swiss Chard in a delicious vegan lasagna I made for a dinner with friends), froze nearly a gallon bag of chopped sweet peppers, and cooked my dried beans for the first time in a soup along with Swiss Chard ribs, carrots, and blended roasted veg (red kuri, carrots, rutabaga).

Then came the apples. I get 5 pounds of apples per week in the fall in a CSA share from a local farm. I dehydrated a half gallon jar of apple slices, and then decided to go big and order some #2 apples - 100 pounds of them. Mom came for another visit and we canned 26 quarts of applesauce, 10-ish 4oz jars of apple syrup (failed jelly), and 8.5 pints of apple butter. Just today I made the last remaining apples into applesauce that I stored in the fridge; probably about another 3 quarts.

The cover crop I planted is looking fantastic. Since a frost still isn't in the 10-day forecast, I think we'll end up having to mow it at least once this fall. As it germinated, it was clear I seeded some areas better than others, so I ordered some more seed and resowed some areas of the new garden yesterday. By mid October I should have most of the existing garden cleaned up and planted with cover crop for fall as well.

My seed garlic arrived about two weeks ago. I ordered from The Garlic Underground, which is just 35 miles from my house. I'm hoping that means their garlic will be well-suited for my garden's micro-climate. Planting will commence a week or two after our first frost.

I've also done a bit of garden-related reading. I ordered a stack of 10 books during Chelsea Green Publishing's Labor Day sale, and so far I've made it through Growing Great Garlic and Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land. While written nearly 30 years apart, both had good lessons for me.

Lastly, we purchased a weather station for the garden! I'm hoping it will better help me understand my microclimate, and will also provide some electronic record keeping of our temperature and rainfall. You can take a peek at my local weather conditions.

That's the highlights of the garden for the last three weeks. 

Harvest Monday: August 17

This week was all about tomatoes. I brought in three harvests, on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and they were mostly tomatoes with a few peppers and zucchini thrown in. There are some beets ready to harvest but I'm letting them sit for a bit.

Here's what I harvested from the garden this week.

With all of these beautiful tomatoes, they were the stars of our meals this week. We had BZT's on Monday (with no lettuce, we replaced it with a grilled zucchini slice and it was pretty good), panzanella salad on Tuesday, and more BLTs starting on Thursday when we got some more lettuce.

The panzanella salad is tossed with olive oil and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. I used red tomatoes from the CSA and the yellow tomatoes are Mr. Stripey from the prior week's harvest.

Over the weekend I started to process the tomatoes. 5.5 pounds of Juliet tomatoes went into the dehydrator. This is the first time I dried them as halves rather than slices, per Dave's advice. They took a little longer than I expected (about 26 hours), but they were worth the wait. Not only are they absolutely delicious (my husband says they taste like tomato fruit rollups), but because I dried them skin side down, the dehydrator trays are still clean! Cleaning up trays after dehydrating sliced tomatoes can be a pain. You've converted me, Dave. Will do another batch later this week.

Another 7 pounds of Celebrity and Mr. Stripey went into some salsa for canning. I use a tested recipe from Annie, a contributor on the Houzz (formerly GardenWeb) Harvest forum. Annie's salsa is our favorite, and I'll try to make at least two more batches this summer. The Celebrity tomatoes were perfect for this recipe, with their fleshy consistency. They were also extremely easy to peel and deseed. I got seven pints for canning, and about 3/4 cup leftover that I used on a smothered burrito for brunch on Sunday.

If you'd like to see what other gardeners around the world are doing with their harvest, head on over to Happy Acres, where Dave hosts Harvest Monday every week.

Harvest Monday: First Tomatoes of 2020

The garden is looking lovely, although honestly I feel like I've been neglecting it since I'm only out there a couple of times per week. My plant selections anticipated that behavior, so I think it should be ok. On Monday (no photo) we harvested our first full-size green sweet pepper, some basil and a single Sungold tomato, which tasted like heaven.

On Sunday night I stepped into the garden before a strong rainstorm and harvested two 8-ball zucchini (which went with a third we'd harvested on Monday), three more green sweet peppers, a bright red Yum Yum pepper, and a few unexpected handfulls of Juliet tomatoes, along with more Sungolds and the first Sweet 100s. Getting tomatoes before the end of July here is a real treat. I'm sure I'll be drowning in tomatoes before long (I have 20 paste tomato plants, two cherries, and two slicers).

Two of the peppers and all three of the zucchini were immediately used for dinner. I stuffed the zucchini with a mixture of onions, peppers, cooked radish and kohlrabi greens, black beans, brown rice, Penzey's fajita seasoning and shredded cheese. We have lots of leftovers; each of us ate about half of one and an ear of sweetcorn from our CSA.

I'm also getting a CSA this year, so that's where a lot of our veggies come from. We've been rolling in the greens though, because in addition to the CSA I've been pulling radishes from the garden and trying to use their leaves, and I've thinned just one row of beets (I have 4 more to go) and used the greens in a variety of dishes. I tried my hand at fermenting radish greens for about a week and used them in fried rice. The beet greens mainly end up in egg dishes and pastas. The reason I had leftover cooked greens to put in our stuffed zucchini was because I cleaned and chopped all the radish and kohlrabi greens we had and put them on a pizza. Using a store-bought crust, I used basil pesto for sauce (I found the pesto—from 2014—buried in the freezer and it still tastes fine), then piled the pizza with greens, mozzarella cheese, more greens, and then curls of zucchini tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Finished it off with some fresh basil from the garden. We'll definitely make this again. (I was inspired by this recipe.)

I took some garden photos on July 5, before I'd finished most of my mulching. These are three weeks old now, but they'll help establish the layout of my barden.

In the foreground of the first photo (past the weeds) from right to left is: melons (Minnesota Midget and Banana), beets (pre-thinning), rhutabaga (pre-thinning), and some irregularly seeded rows of carrots with radish markers.

On the opposite side of the black path on the right are my determinant tomatoes (20 plants), and on the left is my pepper patch (both sweet and hot), and some fledgling kale and sweet chard seedlings (that are doing much better now).

From another point of view, you can see the four determinant tomatoes climbing up rebar, with the rhubarb plant behind them. To the right of the tomatoes is a small basil patch, and moving right from there is fennel, celery, zucchini, and winter squash (Red Kuri and Waltham Butternut).

This post is a part of Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Happy Acres. Head over to his post to see what gardeners around the world are harvesting.

In Spring, Take All The Harvests You Can Get

Here's my first Harvest Monday of 2014!

No, those aren't chives. They're the "waste" from the last trimming of my onion and leek seedlings before I hardened them off and transplanted them outside. They taste like scallion greens. They sat in the fridge for a few days until I figured out what to do with them. Tonight, after dinner, it came to me.

They brightened up a chickpea quinoa salad with kalamata olives and lemon garlic dressing. This will be served on top of a bed of greens and topped with goat cheese for lunches this week.

Other than a few cuttings of herbs I've been growing indoors, one chili pepper plant that made it through the winter (in a pot, inside), and the "micro basil" I thinned out a few weeks ago, this is the first taste of fresh homegrown food we've had in the new house. It's surely the first to be photographed! Next week there's a chance we'll be eating spinach from the garden.

Check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week.

Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard - August 30, 2012

It's been such a crazy week, I posted this on Wednesday thinking it was already Thursday. Needless to say, all this was done before this week started.

I couldn't keep myself out of the kitchen this past week.

First, I harvested the outer stalks of my neglected celery plants and cut them up to freeze in our awesome new freezer with cooled shelves. Everything freezes super fast in this fine piece of machinery (that is, until our 1/2 cow comes and there's no more room on the shelves). I ended up with 2 quart bags full of chopped celery.

Then, I dealt with the green bean harvest that had been piling up. I also took the chance to try out our new FoodSaver. With sales and coupons, we ended up getting it for $30 at Kohl's a few weekends ago. These are frozen in packages that are the perfect size for a meal for the two of us (just over a cup of beans).

Then, it was on to canning. First, I pulled out the "accidental tomato paste" I made last year (that's what happens when you take a nap while you're making sauce) and tried making taco sauce for the first time. It tasted pretty good on the stove - we'll see how it works off the shelf.

I also made fiesta salsa. Although a lot of tomatoes go into salsa, I chose this recipe mainly because it also used cucumbers, and I've been trying to get through the huge pile of cucumbers I overbought when I made pickles. I've yet to find a salsa recipe I like that gets canned, so we'll see how this one holds up.

I also put up about 1/2 a gallon of tomato sauce (frozen in 2-cup portions), but didn't get a picture during the cooking. I used a recipe for "quick blender tomato sauce" that just involves coring and quartering the tomatoes and throwing them in the blender with garlic, basil, parsley, and carrots, then reducing on the stove. It was an excellent way to use the two quarts of canned tomatoes that hadn't sealed during canning the weekend prior, as well as some extras I had sitting around.

I haven't gotten a Kitchen Cupboard post up in awhile, so here are some other things I've been up to:

Mom and I had a marathon tomato canning session on
August 19. I bought 50 lbs of tomatoes at the farmer's market
for $30. She planned to make the trip and I didn't have nearly
enough tomatoes ready, so now I've really got a lot!

I also canned over 40 jars of pickles in July, but apparently haven't taken photos. Perhaps they'll make an appearance in a season-ending pantry photo.

To see what others are doing with their harvest, visit the Gardener of Eden.

First Harvest of 2012

The first harvest at Gross Farms includes two radishes (one is quite small) and a few chives (there are plenty of chives out there but I didn't bother to pick them until today). Not pictured are the handful of basil leaves I picked off my seedlings to encourage them to branch out.

The radishes and chives went into a salad with store-bought greens and a quick balsamic dressing. We served the salad with some golden carrot and white truffle ravioli (purchased at the local farmer's market) topped with pesto (frozen from last year's garden) and our tiny basil harvest. Dinner was delicious.

This is my first year growing radishes. I never really had a taste for them, and honestly - I only grew them this year because I knew they'd be the first thing I could harvest. I purposely planted the ones that claimed to be mild. These easter egg radishes are actually quiet delicious. I'm fascinated by the fact that they're basically growing above the ground. Perhaps I should plant some more :)

What's the first spring vegetable you're usually able to harvest?