Last CSA pickup

Hey, it's the last week of the summer CSA!  My how time flies.  The chickens say "wow, I remember when we were just eggs!"

And the tomatoes remember when they were the star of the garden.  Eh, they look pretty grim now.

But there are more tasty veggies in the ground for this winter!  Here we have 50ft of lettuce, it just needs some heavy row cover for the chilly nights.

Rutabagas are lurking underground.

And Black Spanish Radishes...
These things just look awesome.  Bright white flesh, dark black rind, and deep green leaves.  Bam!  They're also darn spicy.  We like them roasted with other root veggies. But if you don't get around to it, they store for weeks once their tops have been removed.

 I'll channel my inner Mario Bros. 2 and get them pulled out of the ground.  (you know, on the old 8 bit Nintendo?  anyone? anyone?)

Uh, anyway.  There is plenty of parsley.

Today Rob and I put the next wave of beets is in the ground, though I'm not sure when they'll be ready.  The light rain was nice for the transplants, but the paths got a bit muddy/sticky.

Did I mention that the horseradish plants really took off?  Yep, they look like they'll eat you.  Watch your step!  If anyone would like some of this, stuff, I'll dig up a few roots later this fall.  If you have not made horseradish sauce before, beware!  When you grind it up in a food processor it's like you set off a chemical mustard gas bomb in your kitchen.  Run!  Grinding it up on your porch is advised.  The pungent sinus-clearing-deliciousness of fresh horseradish is worth it through.

Oh, we also put in spinach!  This winter staple is loving the cool wet weather...

...and so is rob.

We set up the yurt this past weekend for a little extra shelter.  It's nice to be out of the cold and rain for a bit.  Thanks to the folks who made it out to the farm this weekend for our gathering!  I hope to have more opportunities to meet more of you fine folks again!

So that's it for the summer CSA, but as you can see there are lots of tasty things in the ground.  I'll keep posting what I'm up to and let you know what we're harvesting through the cold months.  We hope you can continue eating in season with Blue Bell Farm!


Whatcha Eatin?

Roasted Rutabagas (and root veggies)
inspired by Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

1 1/2 lbs turnips or rutabagas, peeled and quartered (black radishes, and potatoes too!)
salt and freshly  mille dpepper
canola or safflower oil
3 small bay leaves
2 rosemary sprigs or 6 thyme sprigs

Preheat oven to 375.  Lightly oil a shallow roasting pan or baking dish.  Parboil rutabagas for 15 min or until barely tender.  You can add scrubbed and quartered black radishes and potatoes for the last 3-5 minutes of boiling or until they are barely tender.  Wick off the extra moisture with a towel.  Toss all the root veggies with enough oil to coat them lightly, then season with salt and pepper.  Transfer them to the dish with the herbs and bake, uncovered, until tender when pierced with a knife and browned, 25-30 min.

Rutabaga Fries

This one is pretty darn similar to the Roasted Rutabagas, but perhaps you find fries more appealing...

Peel and slice rutabagas into long batons or french fries.  Soak them in water for 30 min, then drain and towel dry.  Toss with vegetable oil to coat lightly and a few pinches salt.  Spread them on a sheet pan and bake at 400, turning occasionaly, until golden and tender, 30-40min.  When down etoss them with a little finely minced rosemary, sea salt and freshly cracked pepper.

Baked Winter Squash

A practical approach to preparing squash for any number of uses.  Cut a squash in half, then scoop out the seeds and fibers.  Brush the cut surfaces with a thin film of oil and set the squash, cut side down on a sheet pan.  Bake at 375 until the squash looks wrinkled, soft and about to collapse, usually about 30 min.  The cut side should be richly glazed.  Place upright on a serving plate, season with salt and pepper, a tad of butter and serve.  Or scoop out the flesh, mash it with butter and return it to the shell.  You can also use this squash to make a puree, soup or pie filling.  (butternut pie!)

Commonground

The whole Blue Bell Farm crew was up at the Commonground Country Fair this weekend!  We attended workshops on solar heating, soil chemistry, tree felling, poultry health and more!  Saw some beautiful blue ribbon veggies in the exhibition hall,...and thought that we should have entered some Blue Bell produce to the competition.  We also volunteered at the info booth, parking cars and a late night kitchen shift.  Blue Bell purchased a new weeding tool that is sure to make life easier (in theory, we'll do a full report soon enough) and we got the fair special on some technical manuals. We ran into a number of good friends who we always seem to see at the fair, and said hello to the fellow Journey Persons.  There were amazing crafters, and an array of delicious veggies at the farmers market.  Of course, I forgot to pack the camera, so I have no pictures to show for it.  But rest assured, it was beautiful as always.  Minus a misty saturday morning I suppose, but that kept things moving nice and slow.  It's easy to get overwhelmed at such an event, but I think we all got fired up for the last push of work into the fall season.  It was good to be back on the farm today to affirm for ourselves that we too were growing delicious, beautiful veggies.  But also a reminder that for all those pretty things on display there was a tremendous amount of hard work going on behind the scenes.

Best thing I saw at the fair?  A donkey jumping competition.


Whatcha Eatin?

Edamame Appetizer

Bring a few cups of water to a boil
Drop in Edamame pods
Simmer 5-8 min
Pour through colander to retrieve pods
Sprinkle with salt
Squeeze pods to pop the seeds right into your mouth!

Potato Leek Soup
from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

3 fist sized potatoes
3 cups cleaned, chopped leek
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
4 Tbs. Butter
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 C stock or water
3 cups milk
optional: snippets of fresh herbs, thyme, chives, marjoram, basil

Scrub potatoes and cut them into 1 inch chunks.  Place them in a saucepan with the leeks, celery, carrot and butter.  Add salt.  Cook the vegetables, stirring over medium heat, until the butter is melted and all the particles are coated (5 min)

Add the stock or water, bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to a simmer.  Cook until the potatoes are soft (20-30min).  Check the moisture level occasionally.  You may need to add a little extra tock or water if it gets too low.

When the potatoes are tender, remove the pan from the heat and puree it's contents in the milk (use a blender, or food processor itted with the steel blade).  Make sure the mixture is utterly smooth.  Return it to the sacuepan.

Add optional herbs (or not). grin in some black pepper.  Taste to see if it wants more salt.

Heat the soup gently, covered until just hot.  Try not to let it boil.  Serve right away.

(we have made a chunky version of this where we forgo the blender, it can be a bit scary blending hot liquids...)

Tomato Soup
specifically "Variation on a Cream of Tomato III"
also from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

Sick of fresh tomatoes?  Chop em up for a soup!  Tomato soup can be as simple, or as complex as you want, this recipe is somewhere in the middle, and uses your potatoes too.

1 Tbs. butter
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup thinly sliced potatoes
2 cloves crushed garlic
1/2 tsp. salt
1 stalk chopped celery
1/2 tsp. dill weed
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/4 tsp. thyme
2 1/2 cups pureed, cooked tomatoes
1 tsp. honey
1 1/2 cups milk

Place butter, onion, potatoes, garlic, salt and celery in a large saucepan.  Cover and cook over very low heat, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are tender.  If necessary, add a little water or stock to avoid sticking.

Add all remaining ingredients, except milk (have the milk out so it can come to room temperature).  Cover and simmer about 30 min).

Add milk just before serving, heat gently.

Tater Diggin

The ground has been a bit dusty, that's just fine for digging up potatoes.  Most of the tops have died (or I mowed them) and we need to get them out of the ground and into the cooler.  Rob shows his prowess  at lifting two tater buckets.  (psst. there's only 1 potato in each...)  But, to be fair, by this point we had been hand digging potatoes with a spading fork for quite a while.

The bed just in front of him has lettuce seedlings and lines of drip irrigation.

I dig taters and I dig the tunes.  (WMPG!)

Also in the Solanaceae family, but much more charismatic.  Here is the collection of tomatoes we harvested.

Inside the hoophouse, the vines are going crazy!  I won't show you the ones outside, they look nasty and near dead now.  Sungolds on the left are reaching for the peak, and thinking about coming down the other side.  They are still very productive, so they can stick around for another week or two.  But sometime soon there are vines which will need to be cut to make way for winter salad greens.

Whatcha Eatin?

Well, we're eating kale chips, and steamed beets with cheddar.
see 7/3/12 and 7/8/12 for those recipes.  Also, the boxes have items for last week's recipe for crispy kale salad.

Contemplating an asian vegetable soup with some of that Thai Basil, or maybe a miso soup.  Next week we should have Bok Choi which is great with miso.  Searching for the good recipe now...

Farm community

Hey, Rob is back!  After some traveling to places 'away,' Rob hopped right back into the farm work.  Trimming garlic tops on a rainy morning was perfect greenhouse work.  WMPG radio provided the tunes as we consolidated the garlic from several benches to handy bags.

We also fired up the old wheel hoe to disturb the little weeds, and incorporate some dolomitic limestone.  We'll be trying spinach yet again.  We're hoping that the lime from this spring, and then another dose now will get the pH where the spinach will thrive.  I can't wait to take a soil test this fall. No studying required! (tee hee) Just digging up appropriate representative samples of the field.  

After running errands around town, lots of starting, stopping, and leaving the lights on while I wrote things down, the old battery in the farm truck said it was tired.   What do you know, a passing CSA member came to the rescue!  Now that is the community supporting agriculture.  Thank you! 

And here is the usual view at the end of the day in the cooler.  Anything that really needs to be harvested gets put in here during the week before I get a chance to distribute.  Also now that I have extra cooler space, I'm sharing it with Green Spark.  That's their pile of delicious cantaloupes, there.  Alas, I planted fewer melons, so after the porcupines came in, I had no melons to store.
  The CSA boxes get pre-chilled here too!  It's a convenient place to keep them, and the cool boxes should provide the cool, moist veggies with a happy environment for a bit longer during transit to the dropoff.  There is a bit more finish work I would like to do in the cooler, but that can wait till winter.    

Fall?

It's been cooler at night, can fall be on the way?  Not thinking about it, not thinking about it, not thinking about it...  Hey, there are still delicious summer tomatoes!

More here in a bit.


Whatcha Eatin?

Baked Tortilla Espanola

It's like a potato and onion fritatta.

1/2 C extra-virgin olive oil (can use less)
2 large baking potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced. (or the equivalent in unique sized CSA taters)
1 medium onion, thinly sliced (1 Cup)
5 garlic cloves, finely chopped (1/4 Cup)
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
5 large eggs
1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh flat leaf parsley
1 Tablespoon fresh thyme

Preheat oven to 400. Heat oil in an 8-inch, oven safe skillet over medium heat.  Add potatoes, onion and garlic and stir well.  Gently press into an even layer with a spatula.  Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for 10 min.  Stir, season with salt and pepper and press again.  Cover and cook for 10 minues.  Drain in a colander reserving oil.

Whisk together eggs, parsley, and thyme.  Season with salt and pepper.  Stir in potato mixture.  Heat 2 Tablespoon reserved oil in the skillet over medium heat.  Pour in egg mixture and gently press into an even layer.  Reduce heat to medium low.  Cook uncovered for 2 minutes.
Bake until set, about 5-10 min (watch it!).
Invert onto a serving platter if you're feeling fancy, or serve from the pan.

Cooler Complete

Hey, no updates for a while?
Yep.  I was working late nights to finish this:

The walk-in cooler is working!  The vast majority of the work is done.  It even looks mostly like my sketchup model...  Just a little cleanup needed.  And I need to dye my hair to match Mr. Clean White Shirt. (clearly not a farmer)

This is the heart and soul of the cooler.  The CoolBot, and air conditioner.  (I'm voting for the CoolBot with the soul, and the AC unit as heart, but I'm open to suggestion.)

The CoolBot tells the air conditioner to run, even when it is below 60 inside.  So, temperatures can get into refrigerator territory with just a standard air conditioner.  Never mind the oozy foam and dangly wires.  I'll pretty those up too before I write a full build report.

I inaugurated the walk-in with my cooler of eggs and cucumbers.  It looks a little lonely there now, but potatoes and CSA boxes will soon take up residence.

To think, just two nights ago I was finishing the roof...

...And then realized I could not get down.  Thank goodness for nearby trees for shimmying.  (and not having to go up on the roof for a while)

Meanwhile, out on the farm.  Weeds are creeping in.  I've been spending too much time building and not enough time weeding.  Rob!  Where for art thou? (He's been on vacation, but back soon!)

I did get more storage onions out of the ground. (These are the big ones!)  They're curing in the hoophouse now under a few layers of row cover.

The cayenne peppers are ready now too.  Wow, my tongue is burning just looking at that thing.  They'll be dried to use for red pepper flakes.

And the chicks are still doing their chick thing.  The once broody hens are ready to get out of there!

The dad is a Buff Orpington, so we are thinking that the one on the left came from a Buff hen, or a RI Red hen, and the one on the right could be from one of the Australorps, or Gold Laced Wyandotte.  I have to review Storey's guide to see which are sex-linked trait.  Nice critters. 

Whatcha Eatin?

We've been making lots of tomato sauce and salsa recently.  Those tomatoes just disappear if you chop them up with jalapenos, white onion and cilantro. Oh, and a bag of chips.

Leeks!  They're in the box this past week.  They're a bit milder than onions, great in soups and on the grill. But they don't caramelize like onions, so don't fry them.  Potato Leek Soup is a classic, and there are plenty of others.  Store these puppies in the fridge in a plastic bag.  If you forget about them and they start to look funky, just peel off the outer layers till you get back to the beautiful white and green portions.  When preparing Leeks, just slice off the last bit of roots, and then up a the top where the leaves start separating from the tight part of the stalk.  The lighter part is most tender for grilling, but all of it is good in soup.  You may notice that our leeks are almost comically long, I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but I'm doing some research on it.

Grilled Leeks
(from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison)

Slice trimmed leeks in half lengthwise and rinse well.  Steam them, cut side down, until barely tender, then brush with olive oil and season with salt.  Grill on both sides until light grill marks appear, turning as necessary.  Serve with extra virgin olive oil mixed with finely chopped parsley or chervil spooned over the leeks.  Mustard Vinaigrette on the side.




Crispy Kale Salad with Lime Dressing

This lovely number is from one of our CSA members.  Can't wait to try it!

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/09/crispy-kale-salad-with-lime-dressing#ixzz25Z54gYjw

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 tablespoons (packed) palm sugar or light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce (such as nam pla or nuoc nam)
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1/2 red Thai chile or 1/4 red jalapeño, seeded, thinly sliced
• 24 small Tuscan kale leaves (about 5 inches) or 5-inch-long pieces torn from large stemmed leaves
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 cups (loosely packed) mixed tender herbs (such as cilantro, mint, and basil)
• 3 cups mixed shaved vegetables (such as carrots, beets, and radishes)
• 2 cups pea tendrils, watercress, or baby arugula
• 2 cups thinly sliced stemmed Tuscan kale leaves (from 1 bunch)
• 1 cup thinly sliced cucumber

• Ingredient Info:

  Fish sauce is available at Asian markets and in the Asian foods section of most supermarkets. Find Tuscan kale, also called black kale, Lacinato kale, or cavolo nero, at farmers' markets and some supermarkets.  (Blue Bell generally has a variety of Siberian kale in its mix which works similar to Lacinato)
  
  

Preparation

• Microwave sugar and 2 Tbsp. water on high in a medium microwave-safe bowl until sugar is dissolved, about 30 seconds. Let cool. Whisk in next 4 ingredients for dressing. Set aside.
• Arrange racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 250°. Brush tops of kale leaves with oil; season with salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on 2 large baking sheets. Bake, rotating sheets top to bottom halfway through, until kale is crisp, about 30 minutes. Transfer leaves from baking sheets to a wire rack; let cool.
• Mix herbs and remaining 4 ingredients with 6 Tbsp. dressing in a large bowl. Divide salad among plates; top with crispy kale leaves and drizzle remaining dressing over.