Planning the kitchen garden 2017

Although it’s still winter I’m already planning for the new planting season. Every year I read as many kitchen garden books from the library I can. It’s so much fun to plan for the new year. I’m making a list for all vegetables I want to grow and a shorter list with flowers and herbs.

A lot of things are every year the same but I also try some new variety of vegetables to.

This year I will have purple carrots, and purple cabbage. I hear you think, purple carrots??!! Yes, exactly the first carrots ever grow were purple! But in 17^th century in the Netherlands they get there first orange carrot. And it became a great success! I will try the purple carrots and I hope we will enjoy it….

Because my husband and I eat both  vegetarian, we eat a lot of chickpeas. They come from a warm area and we can’t grow them here. But now I did find a old verity of peas called “gråärt” in Sweden it will have the same nutty flavour.

I did find some information about co-culture some will help against the cabbage butterfly. I read about to plant peppermint, celery and marigold between the cabbage plants. The have a smell witch makes that the butterfly not knows where the cabbage plants are, I hopes it will help and otherwise it will look nice also. 

happy new year

A new year is started and we’ve a lot of new ideas we want to do this year!

I have some new ideas for my vegetable garden, I want to grow a lot more for to sell. We will make a new fence we can put around the cabbage plants. Last year I did grow a lot of cabbage, but one night after a little bit of frost, everything was gone. That were the deer and elk some loved to eat cabbage to L. This year will that not happen again! So a fence it will be made!

Still we don’t need to buy potatoes and vegetables. But we need to build a place underground were we can store our potatoes and beetroots, now we store it in the barn but when it get to cold, we need to get everything inside. A ‘jordkällare’ is it called in Swedish. Sander made a start to dig it out last year but it is al lot of work, you find a lot of stones, small stones and BIG stones! Maybe he will finish it this year.

I started to make a ‘to-do-list’ for this year but it still grows longer and longer, small projects, bigger projects and huge projects J maybe I can better call it a 5 or 10 years ‘to-do-list’……..

After making new ideas and while talking about it, I got hungry and decide to bake a ‘raisin bread with almond’.

Recipe

You need for 1 large bread:

500gr flour                                                                  for the almond filling:

2 tsp salt                                                                     marzipan

35gr yeast                                                                   juice of a half lemon

4dl milk (37°C)

25gr butter

25gr brown sugar

1tsp cinnamon

250gr currants/raisin

½ lemon peel grated

1. Make a ordinary bread dough with the flour, yeast, salt, milk, sugar, butter, cinnamon and the grated lemon peel. Set aside to rise for at least an hour.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Do at the same time the currants and raisins in another bowl and add that much water to cover them all. Set aside to swell up.
3. mix the marzipan with the lemon.
4. after one hour, put the raisins/currants in a sieve and let the water leak out. After that mix the dough with the currants/raisins and make the dough a flat rectangle about 3 or 4 cm thick. Make a roll of the marzipan and put in the middle of the dough and roll it all up.
5. set aside to rise another hour.
6. Bake it in a moderately hot oven for 30 min after that sink the temperature till moderate and bake for another15 min. Let cool on a rack.