The bounty has been so wonderful Glenn has wanted to share it with you all! The weekly boxes are exceeding the value of your CSA subscription and making it such an awesome value this year. Yeah! This week we continue to enjoy the corn, blueberries, tomatoes, lettuce, cukes, squashes, eggplants, peppers, your choice of greens, potatoes, onions…
As always, you are welcome to swap out items you are allergic to or have had enough of 🙂
Lots of people that I speak with at markets think it must be wonderful to eat at our house all the time with so much great food around. It is 🙂 But, it is not usually very glamorous because we are working or playing hard and, Reid will attest to this, I usually do not think about what’s for dinner until very late in the afternoon and certainly not until I have wandered out to the barn to see what there is. This week we ate a dozen corn, 2 boxes cherry tomatoes, 6 tomatoes, bunch of kale, 7 squash, a pound of beans, head of escarole, head of lettuce, bag of mesclun, 5 bunches of radishes, bunch of arugula, broccoli, 2 machiaw eggplants, 3 lemon cukes, 7 regular cucumbers, 4+ pounds potatoes, a mole pepper, a Spanish Spice pepper, a bell pepper, one onion and about 5 pints of blueberries (that I know of). We also ate our fair share of chips, ice cream, chicken, eggs, ham, cereal, etc 😉 Tonight I will cook a meatloaf, beans and a couple bunches of beets.
About Peppers
We grow a lot of peppers.
The peppers are coming along, so you’ll be seeing the regular green bell peppers, but you will surely see some other varieties during the season. There are lots of ways to categorize peppers: sweet peppers, hot peppers, specialty hot, specialty sweet, ethnic peppers and of course, ornamental. What’s what? Just put the ornamental peppers out of mind for now, other than to imagine exotic looking plants in containers and bouquets. For sweet bell peppers, we have green, lavender, purple, chocolate, ivory, orange, gold and red. Most of the bell peppers will ripen to red (there’s no strictly red pepper). We do grow a pimento shaped sweet pepper that ripens red very early, the rest of the colored peppers come along later in the season. There are also several long sweet peppers: Cubanelle (aka: banana pepper) which are long and light green, turning orange and then red, and Spanish Spice, which are long and medium green. The hot pepper lineup is a little more complicated: Mole are long, skinny, very mild heat and very dark green; Pablano(green)/Ancho(red) are medium hot, heart shaped and very dark, shiny green (pablano) and turning brick red later (ancho); Hungarian Wax are medium hot (but hotter than the pablano), elongated and smooth yellow-dark orange; Cherry Bomb are hot green to red and cherry shaped; Jalapeno are hot, dark green-purple-red, pointy sausage shaped; Serrano are hotter, smoother and more elegant looking than the Jalapeno; Cayenne are hot-hotter, very long, slender, wrinkly, green-red; and Habanero are super hot, wrinkly lantern-shaped, lime green-orange-red. There’s probably a few I am missing, because we love to experiment and we also trial plants for a few seed companies. *The hotter and sunnier the weather, the hotter the peppers.
Kale and Cannellini Bean Soup with Chorizo
- 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the bruschetta
- 6 to 8 cloves garlic, thinly sliced, plus 1 or 2 more whole cloves
- 2 teaspoons dried oregano
- 1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 2 (15-ounce) cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
- 2 quarts chicken stock, water, or a combination
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 large bunch kale, large ribs removed, chopped
- 8 oz Stillman’s Chorizo
- 1 baguette
Heat oil in a large pot. Add garlic and oregano and cook no more than a minute. Add tomato paste and vinegar, and cook another minute. Add beans and stock and bring to a simmer. Season with salt and pepper. Add kale and simmer, partially covered, for 1 hour. Season, to taste, again with salt and pepper before serving.
also check out Zsa Zsa’s Kale soup and Another Kale Soup
Farm Dirt
**RECAP: Potluck coming up: August 17 at noon at the NB farm. Bring yourselves and something to share. If that is too intimidating, just come and hangout, pack your own picnic or you can always eat corn and tomatoes from us 😉 We’ll walk a little of the farm and be available for questions.
Faith will be on hand to drag your children (or you) off to catch frogs and get muddy, Glenn and I can lead you to some far corner of the farm 😉 and if you have a special interest in birds, wildflowers, bugs, chemistry, botany, historic houses, trees, farming….we’ll be happy to engage you in conversation. 😉
We also have areas for small people to play, raspberries to pick, lawn to lay on, road to bike on, onions to peel (just kidding)… Put it on the calendar.
I see a JP member is looking for a ride…you will see the query on the members page of the blog.
OH, we have new boxes that are a little different. Ask if you have any trouble with them 🙂
Eat well,
Geneviève Stillman
