2007 CSA Week 8

News from Windy Willow Farm: 2007 Week 8


This week’s share includes:
Bag of spinach
½ pt black raspberries – this is my first taste of black raspberries (with some red and gold raspberries thrown in on top, for color). They have an amazing flavor that actually improves when cooked! Mark made awesome multi-grain black raspberry pancakes the other morning, and they were out of this world! (It’s a loose recipe: roughly 4 cups whole wheat flour, 1 ½ cups oats, 1 cup multigrain flour, 4 eggs, 2 tsp baking powder 2 Tbs canola oil, a pinch each of salt and sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, and enough milk to make it all flow nicely). The black raspberry juice blended with the syrup… just awesome. These berries must be refrigerated, if any of them make it home! They mold very easily.
1 bunch swiss chard – the chard is so big and beautiful, in vibrant colors. Be sure to enjoy both the stems and the leaves in your recipes, remembering that the stems take more time to become tender than the leaves.
1 Qt yellow beans – the first of the season, sweet and crunchy!
1 head cabbage – if you’ve never had our cabbage before, we grow a variety called, “Tendersweet” which produces flat, huge heads of wonderfully mild cabbage. These are small, a good introduction to our cabbage. Our favorite method of enjoying a fresh cabbage salad is to shred it with a sharp knife and toss with Italian dressing. Simple and delicious, most people eating it don’t realize how few ingredients are in it! I’ve also been told our cabbage freezes nicely, after blanching, for use in stir-fries all year long.
1 bunch cilantro
1 bag mesclun – This is no baby lettuce! We have a full-sized mix of a great variety of greens: red and green leaf lettuces, Asian greens, red kale and “frizzy” lettuce. The variety of textures and flavors makes a great salad.
1 Qt snow peas
6 Heads Broccoli – this broccoli situation is getting ridiculous! Wouldn’t it be great if I could stagger our harvest and give you one head each week for six weeks?! The weather did not cooperate with us, so we are inundated with the green stuff. I’ll include extra broccoli recipes this week, to help you deal with it all. There’s even extra in the “free choice” bin to help yourself. If you need freezing ideas, let me know.
3-4 zucchini – our favorite way of enjoying summer squash is to slice very thinly, long-wise, marinate in balsamic vinegar and oil, and grill until the edges are crisp. Finish with a grind of sea salt, and enjoy!
2 yellow squash
1 bunch baby carrots

Best guess for next week’s share: Sun gold tomatoes, beets, new red potatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, yellow & green beans.Don’t hold me to it!

It’s a tough time for our raspberry plants- they have lots of beautiful berries on them, slowly ripening, but are turning moldy as soon as they are ripe. All of the hot and humid weather has not been helping them. We have many varieties planted (and the yellow raspberries are my personal favorite) in red, purple, yellow and black colors, so we’re hoping to have enough to enjoy for several weeks over the summer. Some are everbearing, and will ripen in August or September, and some are summer bearing, which are ripening now. I hope you enjoy these. We picked them early this morning, so we wouldn’t have to fight the kids for them!

I need your help at 3:30 on Wednesdays! As the quantity of vegetables in our shares increases, it’s taking more and more time to prepare for CSA pickups. This becomes an issue, because I don’t want to start setting out veggies that are crisp from the refrigerator prior to 3:30, so I need help with this. If you are available, please either just show up at 3:30 or call or email me. Tasks include: numbering bins, filling quarts or other containers with produce, setting up tables, arranging produce on tables and anything else that will make pickups flow more smoothly. This also means you get first pick of the produce, and you can pick up your share as soon as we’re set up, if you’re in a rush. Thanks in advance for your help.

This is the first year that Mark has agreed to let me dig potatoes before their vines die off. (When you let the vines turn brown prior to digging, it cures the skin, and ensures you the largest tubers.) I just couldn’t wait any more to taste the spuds that have been hiding under our soil for months. So I dug 4-5 plants and rushed the beautiful red potatoes into the house to cook up. They were the sweetest potatoes I’ve ever tasted! But, according to Mark, they are still a bit small, and has requested one more week’s growth. That, along with a bit of rain we’ve been getting, will let them grow larger. I’m hoping to share some of our new, red potatoes with you next week. Hmm… those and some fresh rosemary will make an awesome roasted potato dish!

Thanks, for your enthusiastic support,
Gwen, Mark, Sarah and Jason
© Gwen Hyde 2007

Sweet and Sour Swiss Chard
(I just re-discovered one of my veggie cookbooks, “Simply in Season: Recipes that Celebrate fresh, Local foods in the spirit of More-with-less” by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert. A great book! All of this week’s recipes were found there.)

1 pound Swiss Chard 1 Medium onion, diced
¼ cup dried cranberries or rasins 2 tsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced 3 Tbs white or cider vinegar
1 ½ tsp sugar Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse, pat dry and remove Swiss chard stems. Chop stems diagonally into small pieces. Stack leaves, roll up, and slice in 1-inch strips. Keep separate from stems. Set aside.

Fry onion in a deep saucepan with olive oil over medium heat, until softened, 5 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, along with chard stems, cover and cook for 8 minutes. Place chopped leaves on top of mixture (do not stir in), cover and cook another 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir and serve.

Broccoli Salad
3 cups broccoli florets 1 cup raisins
10 slices Windy Willow Farm bacon ½ cup red onion, diced
½ cup sunflower seeds ½ cup cheese, shredded (optional)

Mix in large bowl. Set aside

2 Tbs sugar 1 Tbs apple cider vinegar
¾ cup plain yogurt or mayonnaise

Combine sugar and vinegar and stir to dissolve. Stir in yogurt until well blended. Pour over the broccoli mixture and stir together.

Broccoli Gratin
5-6 cups broccoli, cut in chunks 1 onion, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced 2 Tbs olive oil
¼ cup flour 2 cups milk
1 tsp salt or more to taste ¼ tsp pepper
Pinch each ground nutmeg and ground red pepper 1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
1 cup bread crumbs 1 Tbs butter, melted
¼ cup Parmesan cheese, grated 1 Tbs dried parsley (or cilantro!)

Steam broccoli until crisp-tender, 6-8 minutes. Drain well and set aside. In small saucepan, sauté onion and garlic in oil until fragrant and tender, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle flour on onions and garlic. Cook, stirring constantly, 3 minutes without browning. Whisk in milk and bring to a boil. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and red pepper and cook 5 minutes. Stir in cheese and remove from heat. Combine with broccoli and transfer to a 2-quart casserole dish or glass baking pan. In a separate bowl, combine bread crumbs, butter, Parmesan cheese and parsley and sprinkle on top of broccoli mixture. Bake in preheated oven at 350 until thoroughly heated, 20 minutes.