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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Issue Number Fifteen
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Monday - October 26, 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 26th. 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 26th to October 31st
 Apples-Over 35 different varieties!
We have Mutsu, Northern Spy, Golden
Russet, Hawaii and many more including most common varieties. Variety
peck baskets with at least 10 different labeled apples, along with printed apple
variety descriptions, are available.
Also squash, pumpkins, pawpaws and a great selection of natural fall decorations.
We also still have potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, rutabagas, cabbage, peppers and onions.
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From The Kitchen
Since we are well into apple season, I thought that a couple of more apple recipes are in order. The first one is really simple but tastes great, just like having apple pancakes. The second is one of our favorites. I started with a recipe for houska that my husband's mother had and played with it until I got an apple coffeecake that has become a family favorite.
APPLE PUFF PANCAKE
6 eggs
1 1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 cup flour
3 tbs sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 lb butter
2 granny smith apples, peeled and sliced
2 to 4 tbs brown sugar
Preheat oven to 425 . In blender or large bowl mix eggs, milk, flour, sugar, vanilla, salt and cinnamon until well blended. Melt butter in 12" quiche or 9x13 baking pan. Add apples to dish and place in oven
for several minutes until butter sizzles. Do not let brown. Take out of oven and pour batter over top. Sprinkle with brown sugar and additional cinnamon. Bake 20 minutes or until puffed and brown. Once you take the pan out of the oven, the pancake will deflate a bit - don't worry, it will still taste great!
Serve warm with butter and real maple syrup
APPLE COFFEECAKE
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 package yeast
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups warm milk
4 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 pounds Magicland Farms apples, peeled and sliced
Place 1 tablespoon of sugar and yeast in bowl. Add warm milk and let stand while mixing
other ingredients.
Cream butter and remaining sugar.
Add eggs to the creamed butter mixture. Beat thoroughly. Add yeast mixture. Mix well and add 2 cups flour and salt. Beat together.
Add enough additional flour to make a kneadable dough. Knead until
smooth and elastic.
Pat dough into greased 9x13 pan.
Sprinkle 1/2 cup sugar mixed with 1 teaspoon cinnamon over dough. Place apple slices on top of sugar mixture; dot
with butter.
Place pan in warm spot and let rise until doubled, about 45 minutes.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour. Cool and sprinkle with confectioners' sugar,
if desired.
Our favorite apples varieties for this recipe are: Jonathan, Northern
Spy, Calville Blanc D'Hiver, Idared and Granny Smith. These are just suggestions; feel free to use
your favorite cooking apples.
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Specials In The Spotlight
Hubbard
Squash: 16 cents a pound
Acorn
and Butternut Squash--$4 a half-bushel or $7 a bushel (use your own
containers)
Quantity
Special: Three bushels of squash for $18
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The Boss's Corner
Hi,
Halloween is
almost here which means the beginning of the end of the apple harvest for
us. We have several varieties of apples
that are so late that we don't usually start spot picking them until a few days
before Halloween. We call these apples our
"Halloween" apples since we usually are picking them on nice Halloweens that
don't fall on a Sunday. We will discuss
these apples as well as several other interesting very late ripening apples.
This year it
looks like we will have nice crops of the "Halloween" apples. While the
Halloween apples don't taste alike, they are similar in one respect: they keep
exceptionally well during the winter.
They usually keep nice and crisp in our cooler until May or sometimes
even Memorial day.
Probably the
very best keeping apple we grow is Fuji.
I still remember a few years back a beautiful mid November day. As everyone who lived in Michigan for a few years knows, sunny skies and
November are normally dichotomies. Well, this mid November day I remember was
different, there was clear blue skies with intense sunshine and a temperature
near 60. The real reason why I remember
this day was that when I stopped my pickup in the Fuji grove, I suddenly felt as I stepped into
a time warp since the orchard where I stood looked like our normal August
orchard; Fuji trees were lush with dark green, healthy
leaves along with branches holding tasty-looking, dark red apples. Moments before I stepped out of the truck, I had
driven past nearly leafless apple trees. The few leaves that tenuously hung on the
mostly bare branches, had a yellowish brown cast to them. This day, perhaps, is why I feel Fuji apples are really special. Practically speaking, in addition to keeping
so well (some claim you can keep them 12 months) Fuji are exceptionally sweet and quite
crisp. Many like to add it to cabbage or
kohlrabi coleslaws.
A bit of Fuji History...Fuji is a cross of Red Delicious and Ralls
apples and came to us from the Tohoku Experiment Station in Japan.
It was released with the name Tohoku 7.
Originally thought not to be suitable to Michigan growing conditions (Washington State propaganda?) it does well, during most
years, in the central and southern Michigan apple growing regions.
Another
Halloween apple whose leaves also stay nice and green until bitter cold weather
is the now widely available Granny Smith.
I planted my first Granny Smith apple back before most west coast apple
growers knew about this apple. ( Most Granny Smith apples come from California and Washington). Why did I plant this variety? Well at the time my late sister lived in London and she raved about this apple. She loved the hard crisp, tart flavor. At the time, all Granny Smith apples in England were shipped in from Australia, the country where it was discovered
growing in a waste spot old Granny Smith threw her old apple cores in. While Granny Smith is often recommended for
pies and such, we found Northern Spy, Idared, Jonathan and, of course, Calville
Blanc D' Hiver, are a lot better. If you
like a hard, crisp and tart apple in late winter and early spring this is a
good choice to have stored in a cool spot.
Our all around
favorite Halloween apple has to be Splendor (also spelled Splendour). The reason is its taste. It is exceptionally sweet and juicy with very
thin skin. The reason why I purchased
Splendor trees was that I saw it featured in a fancy gift pack from Harry and
David. I knew Harry and David would only
pick the very best tasting varieties for their gift packs. Splendor isn't grown commercially now because
its skin is so tender and bruises so easily it can't stand commercial handling which
is the way supermarket apples are treated.
Splendor is a
cross between a Red Dougherty and a Golden Delicious. It is a nice sized apple perfect
for people who prefer pink to red since its skin coloring is closer to pink
than red. It is sweet and juicy with
white flesh. This is probably the best
tasting dessert apple you will find in December through February, although
properly stored Golden Russet might top it in early spring.
While we don't
consider them "Halloween" apples, some other of our very late ripening apples
include Mutsu(Crispin), Northern Spy, Golden Russet, Idared and Calville Blanc
D'Hiver. For a printable pdf file of
descriptions for these, and many more of our apples CLICK HERE.
This year we are
making available a peck basket consisting of variety of some of our rarer apples
(minimum of 10 varieties per basket).
Each apple is labeled with a removable sticker. Also included is a booklet with the
description of each variety.. The cost
per peck is $7 for just the apples (plastic liner included) or $11 with
decorative basket included, which makes a nice gift.
Right now, the
weather maps look for a nice, mild week for harvest although the weekend is still
questionable. This brings up a question
several have asked.
Q: Can you
notify your newsletter readers several days before you close?
A: Right
now we plan on staying open until Thanksgiving.
However, if weather turns severely cold (temperatures in the low 30s
during the day and below 28F at
night) we will be closed until it warms up.
I hope to send out a special newsletter BEFORE this happens. However, it might just be the night before. If it gets much colder than this, we will be
forced to close for the season since our produce, if left in the unheated
market, will be damaged even with the door closed. If there is a significant snow which sticks
to the road, we will either open late that day or close until the snow is
completely gone on unplowed roads. We
will also immediately send out a special newsletter for this eventuality
Nashle!
Tom |
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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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