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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Issue Number Thirteen
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Monday - October 12, 2009
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Magicland
Farms
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Everything We Sell We Grow Ourselves
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Greetings!
Welcome to the Magicland Farms' newsletter for the week beginning October 12th. We hope to keep you up to date with the happenings at our farm, along with providing you with some of our favorite recipes and other information we think you might find of interest. If you know of someone who might be interested in receiving our newsletter, you can forward it to them by using the forward link at the end of this newsletter.
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This Week at Magicland Farms - October 12th to October 17th
We now have Jonathan, Gala, Cortland, Macs, Snow, Empire, Spartan, Stark's Jumbo, Greening
and Red Delicious apples and are starting to spot pick Yellow Delicious, Mutsu
(Crispin) and Jonagold. Spies, Russet, Idared and more will be ready shortly. Our
Fall harvest also includes a variety of winter squash including acorn,
butternut, buttercup, hubbard, delicata and more. Magicland Farms IS THE place for affordable fall
decorations. Along with pumpkins from tiny to over 200 pounds, we have an enormous
variety of Indian Corn, unusual gourds, corn stalks and more. Also
available: hand-dug potatoes, Sweet Spanish onions, peppers, popcorn on the ear
and a few pawpaws.
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From The Kitchen
This week we have two recipes for you, one using pumpkins and one using apples. The pumpkin squares recipe is a favorite with our family, especially when made with the puree from our sugar pumpkins.
The Danish Apple squares are an especially tasty dessert. Make sure you don't skimp on the quantity of the apples used for the filling, but don't overfill either - you'll have a hard time sealing the top crust if it's too full. We have traditionally made this recipe with Jonathans but tried Ida Reds recently and found them to be an excellent choice as well.
DANISH APPLE BARS
For Crust
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup Crisco
Milk -- as needed
1 egg yolk -- beaten
For Filling
1 cup cornflakes -- crushed
12 large apples -- pared and sliced
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg white -- beaten
Sift together flour and salt; cut in butter and Crisco until crumbly. Add enough milk to egg yolk to make 1/2 cup. Add to flour mixture, blending until dough forms a ball. (Add more milk if necessary.)
Divide dough in half. Roll one section to cover sides and bottom of 15x10 pan. Sprinkle crust with cornflake crumbs.
Arrange apple slices over top. Combine sugar and cinnamon; sprinkle over apples.
Roll out remaining dough to fit over apples. Seal edges and cut steam vents in top. Brush dough with beaten egg white.
Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until golden brown.
PUMPKIN SQUARES
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 eggs -- beaten
2 cups pumpkin -- mashed and cooked
1 cup vegetable oil
In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Stir in eggs, pumpkin and oil; mix well.
Spread into greased 9x13 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until squares test done. Cool on wire rack.
When cool, frost with cream cheese frosting. Cut into squares.
For cream cheese frosting, combine one 8 ounce package cream cheese, 3 cups confectioners sugar, 2 teaspoons vanilla, 12 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons milk. Beat together until smooth.
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Specials In The Spotlight
ACORN SQUASH
$4.OO for a half bushel or $7.00 a bushel
MIXED WINTER SQUASH
$5.00 for a half bushel or $8.00 a bushel
STARK JUMBO APPLES
$6.00 a half bushel - (a fantastic pie apple where 2
to 5 apples will make a quick, but delicious pie!)
UTILITY GRADE APPLES (MIXED VARIETIES):
$3.00 for a half bushel
Perfect for pies or applesauce
YELLOW OR RED JUMBO SWEET SPANISH ONIONS:
$3.00 for a half peck
YELLOW JUMBO SWEET ONIONS:
$10.00 for a half bushel
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The Boss's Corner
Hi,
Apples, apples, apples! We are right now into the very heart of fall apple
picking time. (We start picking apples
in mid-July and finish up from Halloween to as late as November 15, in some
years.) The reason it is the heart is
that the bulk of our apple crop is ripe from about October 5 to October
25. Last year our crop was small due to
frost in spring. This year it is good
sized and good quality; although a bit late perhaps due to the cool, cloudy
summer. (If you have only lived or
visited Newaygo County for a year or two you must realize this summer was
really strange! For the real info on Newaygo County's summer weather read my website. A good decent rain in the summer here is rare and usually
comes at night. My grandmother spent
many, many summers here and she often referred to it as "a green desert"
because while things stayed nice and green, they also got real real dry because
of the near total sunshine and lack of rain.
The central part of Michigan
is notorious among farmers for being the driest area, east of the Mississippi, in the whole country and me thinks Newaygo County might just have the driest summer weather in the
state! )
Getting back to apple harvest...When you stop by the market
and see all those beautiful dark red Jonathans at such a low price ($6.00 a
half bushel for nice ones) you might wonder why. Well, it's because of my late mother. She loved her Jonathans so I planted more
Jonathan trees back when I started the old orchard than any other variety. (I now have more Honeycrisp planted than
Jonathans but they are just starting to come into bearing.) Why did she love Jonathans? Well they are a great tasting apple that have
more true apple flavor than any other apple, period! (Their texture is OK, but some other apples
have better texture, as some in our family think, for fresh eating.) Companies
such as Sara Lee and most others pay the very highest price for Jonathans,
probably because they have so much flavor they don't need so many apples in
their baked delicacies. The real low down about Jonathans and my mother probably
had to do with one of her uncles on her father's side of the family. Apparently this uncle lived in Washington State and sent them a big box of big beautiful Jonathans
for Christmas every year. They really
relished them. Keep in mind my mother's
family lived in Chicago and only spent the summers in Michigan so Michigan Jonathans weren't that easy to come by. (They were in the coal business so summer was
the dead time in Chicago.)
While Jonathans aren't my family's first or second choice
for fresh eating (it is for just about everything else, especially fried
apples - try using them in the Michigan Fried Apples recipe in the September 21st issue of the newsletter), it is pretty unanimous that Jonagold, which is a cross of Jonathan and
Golden Delicious, is the family's favorite fresh eating apple. Apparently, they aren't unique here since in
nearly every taste test done Jonagold was at the top, and always in the top 5
apples for fresh eating! What is my
favorite? It has to be a Jonalicious (a
Jonathan, Red Delicious? cross), but I like an apple with refreshing tartness. Jonalicious, it is agreed among
horticulturists, would be an important apple variety for those who like an
apple on the tarter side EXCEPT it hardly has any apples on its tree-ever. This year our five Jonalicious apple trees
have the biggest crop in memory but still not nearly as many apples as most
trees. If you grew only Jonalicious
apples, you would have to get $10 a pound just to break even!
This year, like several previous years, we are selling a number
of apple varieties by the pound. Some of
these varieties, like Mutsu (Crispin) are in good supply so we are also selling
them in larger containers (we pick the nicest out for sale by the pound), but
many other, like Ashmead's Kernel, Candy Cane (Surprise), Court Pendu Platt for instance,
supply is very limited (we only have a tree or two of these varieties) so we will
ONLY sell them by the pound. We also
plan on selling variety packs of apples (peck size, I think) with each apple
labeled along with a pamphlet describing each apple in the pack. I hope to iron out the details and get this
down to the market by Saturday. This
brings up a slightly different subject - quality.
In order for apples to stay nice and crisp for longer than a week or two
(some are better room temp keepers than others) they need to be kept below
45F - preferably between 33F and 40F. In
the past, we tried to do this by keeping them on our apple shelves (just to the
south of the market) and relying on cool fall weather. This worked well when the fall was unusually
cool but not so good when there was a warm fall. Well, we now have a walk-in cooler. What we did was partition off and insulate,
with 1-1/2" foam, a space in the red building which we call the "house" although
we don't live in there-it is a storage area.
Now looking into a suitable cooling unit we discovered it ran into
thousands. Well, what we did was get a
$100 room air conditioner and then
bypassed the controls (its built-in thermostat only went down to 60F) with a
jerry rigged one. The problem was that
once it got down to 50F (55F with humid weather) the evaporator coils (cooling
coils) iced up and it stopped working.
Since I have been into hobby electronics since I was 12 and got a MSEE,
I decided to make my own controller - this time using a Microcontroller (embedded
computer) circuit. This controller uses
a Picaxe (an easy to use form of Microchip's PIC chip) and detects an ice condition and then will
shut the compressor off until the ice melts and then start it up again. I also came up with a way of not having to
re-wire the A/C - the controller heats up the A/C's sensor making it think the
room is warmer than it is so compressor turns on using its own controller. Well it works. It worked so well I wrote an article about it
and it was published in Nuts and Volts
magazine in their October 2008 issue. I
also sell the PC board for the controller but not yet a completed unit or even
a kit although I am thinkin' about it.
For more information on the controller and what I have available check
my website at Magicland Electronics. For
information on Nuts and Volts
magazine and purchasing back issues, see Nuts and Volts magazine. I also plan on taking a couple back issues to
the market for those interested. By the
way, if you are interested or know someone who is interested in setting up an
inexpensive walk-in cooler let me know.
I will be happy to discuss the issue with them.
Getting back to one of my other loves, apples...all this
mumbo jumbo means is that Magicland Farms' late fall and winter apples will be of higher
quality this year than in years past because of the walk-in cooler.
Hoping for good apple picking
weather,
Nashle!
Tom
P.S. We ran out of questions customers have been asking about Magicland Farms. If you have a question we would like to hear from you. Send question to magiclandfarms@yahoo.com. Thank you.
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We appreciate your business and hope to see you this week at Magicland Farms.
Sincerely,
Tom and Annemarie Fox
Magicland Farms
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4380 S Gordon
Fremont, Michigan 49412
231-652-2368
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