Our own potatoes! And…?

Our first batch of King Edward potatoes seemed to be reaching the end of their growing season, so I thought I’d dig some, and ask Mr Veggie Box to bring us extra mushrooms this week in place of a portion of potatoes too far. Scrabbling blindly around in the dirt, my fingers pulled up something that was the right size and shape…but turned out to be green. Not sickly, aged-potato, solanine green, either, but proper lime-green. I think I can guess what it is and how it got there (I haven’t cut it open yet). Your thoughts?

This week’s veg box, at the very end of summer

Here’s what I got with this week’s veg box scheme. Every week I get portions of potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and onions, plus a handful of other vegetables, though I can swap some of those if need be. So this week I swapped out potatoes and carrots – because I have accumulations of both I need to use up – and the sum total is three tomatoes, two leeks, yellow onions, fennel, a bag of ‘spring greens’ (? They look rather like collards, less wrinkly than kale), an ear of corn (just one? really?), two large portobello shrooms instead of one, and a zucchini/courgette. To the left (just out of sight, sorry) are a couple of pounds of plums I got from a vendor in the market square. And there’s half a large cabbage in the fridge, along with the remains of borscht from last week’s beetroot.

I shall apply my veggie kabbala meditation to this collection and see what I come up with. I think I could easily use a number of these items in one swoop. We’re having company for dinner on Monday – a Belgian gentleman with, I think, sophisticated taste – so there may be some kind of veggie and fish chowder in the offing. Andrew loves mushrooms so I may even delegate to him the mushrooms on toast recipe in today’s Guardian feature of student recipes by celebrity chefs (one of the few among the bunch that doesn’t have bacon in it!). And the plums? Well, still haven’t figured out what to do with those, because there are too many choices, frankly. But they’re going in the fridge pronto, as they’re starting to ooze juice (yum).

End-of-summer produce

A few items from our garden. Not quite enough to live on, but we'll get there.

Turnips vs. swedes vs. neeps – confused yet?

It seems that, even beyond haggis, there’s still more to learn about Scottish food. So, tatties are potatoes, turnips are turnips, and then there are neeps, which if I understand this Guardian WoM blog correctly, are swedes, or in American parlance rutabagas, a cross between cabbage (kale?) and turnips. It’s a little more clear in the Guardian’s winter veg guide here.

I don’t think I’ve eaten either turnips or swedes since I’ve been here. I always assumed that turnips and rutabagas were the same save for the yellow color of the latter, but given the strong preferences expressed by Guardian commenters, I might be wrong.