Articles

Heirloom vegetables ...
Tasty treats from the `good old days'

Remember how grandfather used to go on about how good food tasted back in the good old days? We are now able to recapture some of that old fashioned flavour today by growing the Heirloom vegetables that are now available.

Take Dalmatian Cabbage - a large, sweet, leafy type; mix with some green curly Kale, and some Red Russian Kale, and you have a great tasting, nutritious, colourful mix. The most beautiful cabbage of all has to be January King, an old English type, with pink overtones to its bluey-grey leaves, it is almost to pretty to cut; but it does taste good too!

Also try the Romanesco Broccolli, De cicco broccoli, the Mustard family, and the old winter lettuces - Odell's, and Rouge d'Hiver red Cos. There are many types of forgotten spinach - Orach, a bush type; Strawberry, with little red fruits; Long standing Bloomsdale, pick and come again type, and perpetual, which grows like Silver beet. All these taste great cooked or raw.

Italian Heirloom endive and Chicories, the "bitter veg" for our digestive systems, do well in autumn - try Radicchio, the self blanching hearting type; Asparagus chicory, green frilly endive, or the shiny flat leaf Indivia scarola.

Mix these with silver beet or the glorious heirloom rainbow beet; this retains its colour when cooked, so if the children help grow it they will love to eat it!

All these attractive, tasty old vegetables can be used raw or cooked. Mix them with your usual ones, and try out some old/new taste sensations!

Ginny