Harvest Time!

Chinese Broccoli - Kai Lan - Gai Lan

We planted some Chinese broccoli which is also called Kai Lan and Gai Lan.   Chinese broccoli is a more delicate version of regular broccoli.  The stalk is very thin with a small broccoli head and soft leaves.   It's close in appearance to broccoli rabe but not in flavor since broccoli rabe tastes super bitter to me. You typically harvest the small head with a few inches of stalk and the top most leaves. 

At restaurants it's steamed then sauted with 

garlic.  The leaves wilt down like spinich so you end up with this interesting dish that is like a few different veggies in one. It's wilted like spinich, has tiny heads like traditional broccoli and crunchy/tender stems too.     

These are pictures of baby Chinese broccoli coming up from seed.  Super easy to grow and came right up on their own without any fuss.  The leaf miners seemed to have found them but not a whole lot and most of the damage is on the older leaves that you wouldn't eat anyway.  The powdery mildew that has taken over the rest of the garden (more on that later) doesn't affect these guys. That's my kind of veg.   The down side is that you have to plant quite a few to get enough for a meal.

Making A Meal

We always joke that this is our snacking garden, that there isn't enough food at one time to make a meal.  Well, we were slow in getting there but we made it happen.  We just eat all of the greens together!  I can't believe that we didn't think of that sooner.

So, here are all of the veggies that we would cook together and add to our meal. There's broccoli, snow peas and Chinese broccoli.  They all go well together and you end up with a veggie medly.  We steam and then saute with garlic. YUM!  We were on a roll and didn't buy veggies from the store for a long while. It feels so rewarding to eat from your own garden.