CSA Week 12
This week you MAY have green cabbage, broccoli, apples, peaches, tomatoes, onion, squash, cukes, lettuce, peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, garlic?
It looks like a promising CSA week for cole crops! The broccoli and green cabbages are sizing up. AND, gorgeous Paula Red and Molly Delicious apples as well as peaches!! Enjoy the fruit!
The first large crop of broccoli heads are sizing up. When this happens, usually all at once, all it takes is one hot day to push it from the perfect budded stage to flowering. Each of those tiny green balls at the end of every broccoli branch is a flower bud; leave it too long in the field (too long could be an extra day) and those flower buds will open and be a bouquet of bright yellow blossoms. It’s annoying, and cool.
Hey, we are still taking orders for anything bulk – even broccoli. Please email me with your needs, tomatoes will be over the peak before we all know it.
We’ve come to the point in the season when it is really hard to know what is going to find its way into the boxes and bags. The boxes and bags I carried last Monday were heavy, I mean HEAVY. For many of you, we know this loads of produce is welcome, for others, not so much. When we have it, we give it to you, regardless of value, so please don’t get exasperated if there is “too much food” and you feel overwhelmed or wasteful. Use this bountiful time as an opportunity to share with a coworker, neighbor, or, if time and space permits, make a lot of something and freeze it for later. 🙂
Recipes
If you have still not made any vegetarian chili this summer, there’s no time like the present! Here’s my red lentil version, quite hardy and if I was to make it this weekend (which I might) I would add a diced pepper and sub out a squash or two for eggplant 😉 Veggie Chili
Roasted Broccoli
Cut apart broccoli in to 2” chunks and/or florets – by all means use the stems now, as they are tender and sweet. Later in the season you may want to peel the stems. Toss in 1 TB olive oil, 1 tsp coarse salt, lots of black pepper and several cloves of crushed garlic. Spread out in baking dish (I use my lasagna pan), bake at 400 degrees until fork tender (15-20 mins). Sprinkle with lemon juice (half a lemon or equivalent)
Old blog post for Broccoli Soup
Basically, cook the broccoli in water or your favorite broth, puree, add cream or some kind of milk, adjust seasoning. This week the girl child came back from the barn with potatoes along with the broccoli; I boiled the potatoes with the broccoli, pureed as usual, added milk instead of cream because it was already so thick with the potato 😉
Fried Sauteed Cabbage (does that make it sound better?)
SO easy and SO delectable. You won’t believe how wonderful cabbage fried in some kind of fat can be unless you do it.
The basic of all basics: thinly slice the cabbage, melt a generous 2 Tb of butter in large frying pan, add cabbage, toss in butter, and fry for 7-10 minutes, stirring as needed to make sure it cooks uniformly and does not burn, until tender but not mushy. Season with salt and pepper.
That’s your jumping off point. Of course you could fry up a few pieces of bacon and use that fat to fry your cabbage, add a super thinly sliced onion, paprika, celery or caraway seed, even stir in a little bit of sour cream at the very end. The cabbages we are harvesting now are perfect as a side dish for 4, so don’t sweat it!
Member Aimee sent me this recipe a couple years ago, I like it! I don’t peel my fruit and often use peaches 🙂
Tomato & Nectarine Salad
(adapted from Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/food-dining/2015/08/18/recipe-for-lamb-spiedini-with-peach-tomato-and-mint-salad/Y2cdZ4ZU1QVu8fMXfu2fIJ/story.html)
2 T red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
3T olive oil
2 large tomatoes, seeds squeezed out, chopped
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded, chopped
3 nectarines, peeled, chopped
2 sprigs fresh basil, minced
In a salad bowl, whisk together the vinegar, salt, and pepper. Gradually whisk in olive oil. Add the tomatoes, cucumber, nectarines and basil.
Also check out:
Chinese Cabbage Salad
Slaw, Classic or Signature?
Beet and Beet Green Risotto with Horseradish from member Jenn
Cabbage and Apples Braised in Cider ~ Cooks Illustrated
Toasted-Oat Shortcakes with Basil-Scented Peaches
Farm Dirt
The Monday CSA had the week off for Labor Day, but we will add a week on at the end, as we do for the Independence Day folks.
We have welcomed the arrival of a third Beltie calf this week past. They are charming springing around the pasture! If you are new to us, we had a large herd of Belted Galloway cattle for years and years. Glenn grew up on a dairy, so the cows were kind of a pet hobby. Yes, they are grass fed and we sent a certain number of steers off every year to subsidize keeping the herd. Three years ago, the year of the drought and no peach crop, we sold most of the herd (60+ animals, saving two cow-calf pairs to rebuild with. Two years ago I bought Glenn a bull as an anniversary gift, and it is the gift that keeps on giving. The four we had has grown to eleven!
Best part of this time of year is seeing actual bucket loads (John Deere tractor buckets that is) of produce rolling up to the barn. I captured them bringing in a broccoli harvest, and then Chinese cabbage. Quite a sight!
At the end of August, we had a watchful eye on the sky for Night Hawks. As usual, on the 28th, Glenn called me to come out of the house to see them all over the sky, making what looks like a somewhat disorganized and clumsy migration. That’s also quite a sight!
Eat well,
Geneviève Stillman
