We’ve got a great thread about recipes for our garden produce. But how about food preparation for those of us who love to garden, and don’t like cooking?
What do you like to eat fresh from your garden, without cooking it?
What simple, basic ways of preparing specific crops taste good and require very little time in the kitchen?
What are some excellent, flavorful, easy two or three ingredient combinations that can be thrown together with almost no thought or effort?
I find that I value crops with a long shelf life at room temperature, because then I can pile them up on a shelf after harvest and not bother with chopping or cooking them until I want to eat them.
I value crops that taste great eaten fresh.
I value crops that can be chucked into a dehydrator for a tasty one-ingredient snack.
I value crops that can be cooked in a microwave. (Steaming vegetables on the stove? You have got to be kidding me.)
I value crops with strong tasty flavors all on their own, so that I don’t need to bother with spices.
I value crops that taste excellent with one of the very few spices I bother to use consistently. This usually means cinnamon for sweet things and garlic for savory things. I never seem to get tired of either of those, unlike all other spices I like, and they have great health benefits.
My squash-eating habits are definitely changing now that I have squash that tastes nice raw. Not quite fresh from the garden, but in winter it’s a nice fresh crunch up here and the prep is… well, it’s cutting and peeling squash, which depends on your rind etc.
While we’re on squash, never underestimate the power of tossing it whole into the oven on low, setting a timer for a couple hours, coming back, and then mashing the flesh with some butter. Add salt or cinnamon sugar as you see fit. It makes the whole seeding/peeling thing super easy. The only issue is you lose the seeds for that squash.
I had to stop dehydrating zucchini because it was too tasty and I’d eat like 3 zucchinis worth of dried chips and then drink water and my stomach would hurt. Probably this would be even tastier if dehydrated with a bit of nutritional yeast or aminos or something.
Never underestimate the power of tossing leafy greens or thinly-sliced anything into not-bottom-end ramen. Can kettle it, microwave it, or stovetop it as energy permits. Mama brand tom yum shrimp flavour are my go-to but there are so many.
Ooh. I should try dehydrating zucchini chips and see if I like them, too. If so, I could melt some cheese (a.k.a. the lazy person’s cheese dip) and snack on zucchini chips with cheese. I keep thinking it might be a good idea to buy a mandolin to make it easy for me to make chips to dehydrate, but then I look at the sharp blade and go, “I will definitely cut my finger open on that . . .” How do you make your squash chips?
Dried tomatoes are basically candy, as well, and they last two years in the cupboard if you vacseal them very dry.
I slice them actually, the drying process shrinks them a lot, and as I said I don’t do many of them nowadays. I like a mandolin for thin things myself or my food processor has a slicer blade on it which I use all the time for this sort of thing. I never cut myself on the mandolin, it’s always something like double-sided tape or cardboard or a plastic plant pot.
A mandolined cucumber in a little yoghurt with smashed garlic is a pretty good dip too.
I can see that with dried tomatoes! Dried fruit is basically candy. Dried strawberries are one of my favorite kinds of candy.
I was delighted, and not really surprised, to find last year that I can store homemade fruit leather on the shelf in a tupperware that isn’t vacuum sealed or anything, and it’ll last for a year without problems. Heck, it’ll last for months sitting exposed to the air without issues. I figured our 0% humidity most days would mean that dried food storage would do well here!
The only issue that arises if it isn’t in a tupperware is that it gets dust on it.
For squash you can cut it in half and bake it. Then you can keep the seeds. Wait for it to cool a bit and it’s easy to roughly slice into wedges and the skin comes right off.
I love Butternut this way, just run the mixer over it to mash. Toss in a little brown sugar and cinnamon. Top with butter and salt and pepper to taste.
I want to try taking some baked like that and let it get cold and firm up. Cut into fries, maybe roll in bread crumb or seasoning. Ready to bake or fry. And would be easy to freeze on a tray on package up to be an easy grab food.
I’ve been looking at fermenting veggies. Going to try some. It would make for easy grab and eat food or grab and toss with some other veg or meat.
I enjoy chopping a sweet potato into big chunks, nuking it, and then adding a bunch of cheese on top and nuking it for a few more minutes to melt the cheese. Sweet potatoes taste really good with cheese.
I’m not one to buy all ths kitchen gadgets but I got an Instant pot (off brand) and I use it all the time to pressure cook and slow cook. It has several temp settings. You can change the cook time. You can even set a timer for it to start cooking later.
I love doing soups in it. I can toss in some butter and let it heat up while I start chopping veggies. Toss em in and stir the sautéing veg. When they’re ready I put in some water or broth and immersion blend. I do this with all the veg I don’t like the texture of bc I’m picky but like the flavors. Now you can throw in your cooked meat, any whole or diced veg, beans, potatoes,… Put it on slow cook and set the timer. Set an alarm on my phone to eat dinner in a couple hours.
If you want some ground beef or sausage you can brown that first, then add the veg to sauté with it. Put in a spoon of flour to soak up the grease and let it sauté several minutes to cook the flour. Top with whatever broth or other seasonings.
I wound up buying a Carey electric pressure canner because my sister raved about how much she loved her Instant Pot. I thought, “Wait, could I find an electric pressure canner that would also work as an electric pressure cooker?” Turns out, yep! I use my normal metal pressure canner on the stove far more often, because it has a capacity of seven jars instead of four, but when I only have a half batch, the electric one is great.
On top of that, the main reason I want the electric one is to hedge my bets that I’ll still have a way to prepare long-term food storage if the grid goes down. My stovetop model can’t be used over a campfire (it says so in the instruction manual, with quite a few adamantly worded dire warnings), and there’s no way I’ll have access to natural gas for my gas stove if the grid goes down. However, I will have access to electricity because I have solar panels that can charge batteries that I can plug electronic devices into.
So while I use the Carey for canning sometimes, the most important reason I have it is because I think it’ll actually work better than the lower-tech tool, in an extreme emergency. Ironic!
Meanwhile, it makes great beans or stew with very little effort on my part, which is the main thing I use it for. I strongly prefer cooking appliances that can turn themselves off when they’re done. The microwave is very good. Things on the stove, uh, well, I tend to burn them.
I really love instant pots for that reason. Turn it on, come back in two hours or in 10 and there’s warm food.
For some reason I have cucumbers on my mind, despite it being really not cucumber season. In 2015 I was inundated with an enormous number of really large perfect cucumbers, and I ended up putting them in the blender with a can of frozen margarita mix (you could add booze or not) and they were pretty great. They make a nice slushy consistency and it uses them up.
Oh, interesting! I could see them going very well as part of a fruit smoothie. Unripe cataloupes taste almost exactly like cucumbers, so I bet cucumbers added in with a bunch of sweet fruits would lend a hint of a melon flavor to the mix.
I realize I didn’t mention The Salad because it is a bit more prep, but it looks like this:
Fill a wine bottle with 2/3 olive oil, 1/3 basalmic vinegar, a little honey, some salt, and some chopped herbs. Shake it well until the honey is dissolved, stick it in the fridge. This is kind of like cooking but you only need to do it once a month or so.
Go out into the garden with a mixing bowl and scissors. Put things that look like food into the bowl, cutting them up with the scissors as you go (lettuce, brassica leaves, herbs of all descriptions, squash flowers, small squash, radish pods, radishes, peppers, oniony things, baby corn, tomatoes, weeds that are aggressive enough to catch your eye, peas, beans, pea and bean flowers, etc, etc)
Go into the house. If you like cheese sprinkle some on, especially some kind of goat cheese or feta. Can use a boiled egg if you want, or some shaved charcuterie nonsense or lunch meat, or not. Pour on a glug of the stuff in the wine bottle in the fridge. Toss it around a bit. When you’re done wipe the bowl with some bread and eat that too.
I ate this every day when I lived with my gardening partner one summer and convinced him to make the dressing, so it was even better.
Rosemary, oregano, dill, summer savory, and ground mustard seed in the dressing, with rosemary and mustard being absolute requirements for me. Borage, sweet ciciley, dill again, chive flowers snipped at the base so the florets fall apart, nasturtiums, chervil, fennel, sorrel, etc etc in the salad. I found the more robust herbs tended to take to vinegar and refrigeration better, while the more tender ones went better in the salad itself.
Need to use more nutmeg. I use it on my old fashioned pies as it was the original spice topping used when serving back then. It is said to help in reducing stress, aid in mental activities and may help in improving concentration and enhance the blood circulation to the brain. Just use in moderation.
bc I’m picky but like the flavors. Now you can throw in your cooked meat, any whole or diced veg, beans, potatoes,… Put it on slow cook and set the timer. Set an alarm on my phone to eat dinner in a couple hours.