Week 4

You MAY have these things: Summer squash of some variety or color, lettuce (of some variety), Kirby cucumbers, chard or beets, beans or peas of some variety, some kind of berries, kale, maybe fennel… It is still actually early in the season, but we are harvesting more and more variety daily it seems. We actually started harvesting corn for retail sales on July 1 – pretty amazing job Glenn!!! Glenn jumps through extraordinary hoops to have corn this early, so it is very dear. You can use your Stillman’s Bucks to buy some at a market near you and you shall have corn in your weekly box before you know it!

Some of you are asking about coming to the New Braintree farm. Here’s the recap: You are welcome most anytime. Please email me in advance, if you can. I will try to leave a farm map out for you – that way you can navigate to the crops of your choice.  Please park on our driveway and do not drive into the fields. Otherwise, you can roam freely and happen upon what you like 😉 We welcome you to pick anything you like and only ask you to please be fair to the farm if you would like anything in quantity. We are still picking strawberries and now raspberries and some blueberries. You most likely will never see raspberries in your box, but we encourage you to take a trip to the farm, your kids (human and or canine) are welcome too, as long as they try to behave 😉

This is great salad weather and I find many salads become the full meal when I add a little grilled steak or fish or whatever. I also LOVE kale salad, sometimes with a little quinoa – yum! There are several other kale salad recipes on the blog, different than mine included in last week’s letter.

This is also a perfect time for making frozen cucumber drinks or refrigerator pickles, grilling anything that you like cooked, or trying out that cold soup you wondered about in the last periodical you looked at.

Farmkeeping

Please return boxes weekly so we may reuse them

• Please break down your boxes, without tearing or ripping and leave them neatly at your pickup location
• I try to get the weekly letter onto the blog and remember, you can always Instagram, FB, Tweet about what you have 🙂

Coming Up:

• Tomatoes?
• Corn?
• Blueberries
• Regular cukes
• New potatoes?

Recipes

There are TONS of recipes for cucumber salad… here’s a creamy one:

Cucumber Salad

• ½ cup sour cream
• 2 Tbs lemon juice or vinegar
• 2 Tb fresh dill
• S&P

3-6 cucumbers, sliced thinly (I like to peel mine in cream based salads, DKW). Whisk together first ingredients, toss with cukes. Eat right away, or chill for a while 😉

Another method to try

• 2 cucumbers
• 2 Tb dill
• ½ cup white vinegar
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup water
• 1 tsp salt

Slice cukes paper thin and layer in bowl with dill in between. Combine sugar, vinegar, water and salt; pour over cucumbers. Chill for 4 or more hours.

Check out:

Summer Squash, Cucumber, Fennel Salad

Sriracha Refrigerator Pickles, made with the chard stems

Swiss Chard Fritters

TsatsikiGourmet | May 2008

Yield: Makes about 1 cup

• 1/2 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced
• 1 garlic clove
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup plain yogurt (preferably goat’s or sheep’s milk)

Toss cucumber with 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper in a colander and drain 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, mince and mash garlic to a paste with 1/4 teaspoon salt, then whisk together with olive oil, yogurt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
Squeeze out any excess water from cucumbers with your hands, and then stir cucumbers into yogurt mixture. Season with salt.

Grilled Zucchini or Summer Squash

Cut off ends of squash, then slice lengthwise into ¼” strips. Brush both sides with olive oil, sprinkle with S&P. Grill over medium hot fire, turning once, until marked with grill stripes (probably about 8-10 minutes). Serve at any temperature. We like to drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar and serve with steak or on salad.

In spite of the heat in my kitchen, I still turned the oven on to make a large Casserole of Summer Squash and Sausage for supper (many mouths to feed on Tuesdays).  I used 8 squashes (layers of thinner slices work better, but you certainly can go for a 1/4-1/3″ slice and cook accordingly), a pound of sausage, small onion sliced, 2+ cups of cheese, and (wait for it) a can of cream of mushroom soup.

Brown the sausage while slicing your squash and onion. Layer sausage, soup, squash then cheese twice, bake in a 360 oven (I covered mine for a while, but took foil off when squash seemed almost cooked to dry off the extra liquid) until squash is tender.

About Cucumbers

We grow a lot of cucumbers. You WILL see the regular slicing and pickling cucumbers, and MAY see the very smooth skinned, dark green Diva, as well as the heirloom Lemon cucumbers (round, yellow balls). You do not need to peel any of our cucumbers, so it is by preference. We do not treat them with anything to preserve them like paraffin – as many supermarkets do. Any film you may observe on ours is the natural bloom.

**If you feel like it, and it is not necessary, you can lightly salt the sliced cucumbers and let them drain, after ½ hour or so, you can squeeze the extra liquid out of them and your salads will be less watery. If I want the salt off, I give them a rinse, squeeze them out and pat dry. This is often useful for tea sandwiches 😉

Farm Dirt

This is the time for squash preserving, so let us know if you need a case; we will give you a hefty CSA break. I make a lot of chocolate zucchini cake, zucchini squares, and zucchini bread and freeze it…so handy all winter. My kids pack zucchini squares in their lunch – what a great snack!

The amount of Bluebirds and Orioles around the farmyard is beyond anything Glenn or I have seen in 25 years here! We are SO glad they are having success and both do much to consume insects on the farm! Faith had a bat in in bedroom the other night and called to us so sweetly to help her. Glenn and I went in and captured it with a towel, she helping the whole time, and before I released it out her window, I peeled enough toweling back to reveal its adorable face and ferocious insectivore teeth.  Thank you to the mammals that eat insects too!

Yes, it is dry here in at the New Braintree farm, but we have gotten a few brief spells of rain, just enough to keep the crops we cannot reach with irrigation going. Hearing the irrigation pumps going all over the farm is background noise these days and a complete necessity for the berries and tomatoes!

Eat well,

Geneviève Stillman