Eating From The Garden…

At R’s, I grew jerusalem artichokes in the garden.  I first grew them the year before last when a neighbor brought us some to try.  They grew fine, but never having eaten them before, I wasn’t sure how to use them.  So, I let them overwinter in the ground, finally harvesting them in spring as I was preparing the garden for the new growing season.  Immediately after harvesting, a last-minute week-long trip came up.  When we returned from the trip the ‘chokes had gone bad (even in the cool of the root cellar — I’d read that they don’t store well and they apparently don’t).  So I composted them, the same way we composted everything else at R’s — by burying them in a fallow garden bed.  Of course, that just meant that, later that spring, not only did some hidden unharvested ‘chokes sprout from the original garden bed, but the composted ones sprouted as well!  Double the yield!

Last week when I was at R’s getting another load of stuff from my storage shed, he gave me a plastic bucket with the ’chokes he’d just harvested, stored in sand.  I knew I should not expect them to last long, even stored in the sand like that.  So tonight, I tried a recipe I’d been meaning to for a while, one that had been mentioned last fall on the HealthyCheapCooking group.  Turned out yummy!

 Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

1 lb Jerusalem artichokes
1 tsp Lemon juice
1 md Onion, chopped
1 Tbs Olive oil
3 cups chicken broth
Salt and pepper
1 cup milk (or soymilk)
1/4 cup walnuts, toasted

Peel the artichokes. Cut them in half. Rub the cut halves with lemon juice and set side.

Chop the onion. Heat the olive oil. Add the artichokes and saute them, along with the onion, for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add the stock, salt and pepper. Bring the stock to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. When cooked, remove from heat and let cool.

Place soup in a blender in batches and puree until smooth. Return to a clean pot, add the soy milk and bring back to a boil. Serve in bowls, garnished with walnuts.
Makes 4 servings.

I doubled the recipe (though I didn’t realize until typing this that I forgot to double the stock part — I only used 3 cups, so the soup would have turned out somewhat thinner if I’d paid attention and doubled *all* the ingredients).  I estimated two pounds of artichokes:

After peeling and dunking in lemon juice:

End result:

Not sure why it looks almost pink in that photo — in actuality the soup was slightly green-tinged, almost like split pea soup.  Mostly a light brown caramel color, with that light greenish tinge.

I hadn’t especially liked the smells while it was cooking, so I was afraid I was going to dislike the taste of the soup.  But no fear, it was yummy!  It tasted very much like potato soup, with only the slightest of difference to my tongue.  The walnuts added a perfect flavor and bitterness (even though I used untoasted walnuts — I’ve not toasted walnuts before, and wasn’t sure if it was just as simple as putting them in the oven for a bit, but even if it *WAS* that simple, I wasn’t going to turn on the oven just for that).

I had one *big* bowl of the soup for dinner, with some good french bread and a salad.  And the leftover soup is enough only for a smaller bowl than what I had tonight.  So even with a bulked up recipe I still only got two hefty servings.  Maybe next time I’ll make 4x the recipe instead!

While I liked this enough that I will probably make it again, it *was* a lot of work.  I’m not really sure the ‘chokes needed to be peeled and dunked in lemon juice — that might have been just so the blended soup had a paler color — just like when potato recipes tell you to peel them, but it’s not really necessary and besides, the peel is good for you.  Certainly it would have been a *much* easier process to just scrub the chokes clean and perhaps slice off the rootlets.  But when I cook something for the very first time I tend to follow all the rules, just in case it really matters.  But I think for next time I might leave them unpeeled.  The blending and switching bowls was a  minor hassle — mainly the idea of getting two pots dirty was unappealing — but if I don’t mind a less homogenously-blended soup, I don’t see why you couldn’t blend and return each batch to the original bowl…

 Anyway, success in eating from the garden!