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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Issue Number Seventeen
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Monday - November 9, 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 November 9th. 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 - November 9th to November 14th
Apples-Over 35 different varieties!
Mutsu, Northern Spy, Golden
Russet, Fuji 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.
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 From The Kitchen
Over the fall and winter months, apples turn up quite frequently as part of our meals or as dessert. One of the favorite apples dishes around here is applesauce. Making applesauce is not a complicated as you might think. Probably the most difficult thing is deciding which apples to use!
EASY APPLESAUCE
Yield: 8 cups
5 pounds (1/2 peck) of apples, peeled, cored, and sliced into 1/4" thick slices
water
sugar (optional)
Instructions:
Place apples in pot and add an inch of water. Cook on medium-high heat until contents simmer, adding more water to keep from burning. Allow to simmer until the apples are tender and are falling
apart when pressed against the side of the pot. Turn burner to low and
mash apples with potato masher or electric beater. If you like,
you can add sugar to sweeten.
Tips for Great Applesauce:
1. It may sound strange but we never add sugar to our applesauce. We've found the sauce to be flavorful and sweet all on its own.
2. When cooking on the stove top, the water in the pot evaporates very
fast so always make sure there is at least 1/4" of water on the bottom.
This will prevent burning.
3.
To make the apples cook faster, try using a wide pot. There will be
more surface area which means more apples in contact with the heat.
4. Applesauce freezes and cans very well. For freezing, just pour
cooled applesauce into plastic freezer containers or freezer jars and
place in freezer. Will keep for over a year when stored at 0 F or
below. And for canning, you must have the apples come to a boil before
filling the canning jars. Make sure that when you fill the jars or containers to leave at least 1/2" of headroom in the jars or containers.
Our Favorite Apples for Applesauce:
Spartan
McIntosh
Crispin/Mutsu
Jonathan
Northern Spy
Empire
I found this recipe for meatloaf a few years ago and it was a crowd pleaser. I probably should make it more often than I do.
MAGICLAND FARMS' APPLESAUCE MEATLOAF
1/2 cup milk
1 cup applesauce
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
2 pounds ground beef
2 tablespoons grated onion
2 eggs
1 cup bread crumbs
4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
1 cup catsup
4 tablespoon brown sugar
2 teaspoon prepared mustard
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine
milk, applesauce, salt, beef, onion, eggs, bread crumbs and cheese, stirring
with a spoon. Spoon into loaf (bread) pan or form loaf in shallow baking dish. Combine remaining
ingredients and spread over meatloaf. Bake 1 hour or until loaf is cooked through.
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Specials In The Spotlight
November
Squash Specials:
Hubbard:
16 cents a pound
Acorn
and Butternut: $4 a half-bushel or $7 a bushel (use your own containers)
Quantity
Special: Three bushels of squash for $18.
1/2 Bushel Apple Special:
The following varieties of apples are priced at $6 a 1/2 bushel or two 1/2 bushels for $10:
Jonathan
Empire
Spartan
McIntosh (limited supply)
Red Delicious
Golden Delicious
Jonagold
Cortland (limited supply)
Stark's Jumbo (limited supply)
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The Boss's Corner
Hi,
Well, I sure am happy I had
enough nerve to mention to Annemarie, in the early part of this week, that I would
like to send out a special newsletter and let all the subscribers know about
the upcoming Indian Summer that was about to bathe Newaygo county in sunshine
and mild temperatures. It's just as
important to give people good news as it is the bad news. However, I have to admit it is a lot safer to
give people good news than bad news. The
King's messengers of long ago as well as the prophets in the Bible learned that
the hard way. Right now, it looks like
Indian Summer will continue for at least a week although I doubt it will get
close to 70F again, like it did on Saturday and Sunday, until March at the
earliest. I truly hope we don't see any
70s during December, January or February.
If we do, you know something is screwy.
By the way, we took advantage of the beautiful weather on Saturday and
planted our garlic. Everyone enjoyed
planting this year, perhaps because of the stunningly beautiful day.
Now, we decided to officially
close for the season on Wednesday November 25 (the day before Thanksgiving) and
hope to open in spring again with apples for sale that we have stored in our cooler. Shortly after that, usually starting
in early to mid June, we will be selling strawberries and possibly some early
vegetables.
Since we are getting near the
end of our season, I would like to look back at the high points of the season. The first high point has to be our Flamin' Fury PF1 peaches. This beautiful, delicious peach is ready so
early in July that it is a shocker. When I saw it, I had a premonition it was going to be a fantastic season for fruit - and I was right. I feel bad there weren't enough PF1s to go around and not everyone reading
this had a chance to taste it. Since the
trees are young they should produce many more of these delights in 2010 than
they did in 2009. I have to admit our
peaches this year were unbelievably tasty.
They are from a new orchard we started three years ago. The fruit from the last peach orchard, which
froze out during the winter of 1994, didn't
seem to have as good a flavor as this new orchard. The big difference was the soil: the old
orchard was planted on clay loam, this new orchard is on loamy sand.
The next high point was our broccoli.
While we grew some broccoli many years ago, this broccoli was superb! We plan on expanding our broccoli planting
next year. Then there were the High
Tunnel Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes. While
this wasn't the first year for them, they really took off in sales so we had a
hard time keeping the market supplied.
You may have noticed that some of our Sun Sugar tomatoes tasted sweeter
than others. We found that the ones
growing in the high tunnel had a bit more sugar in their juice than the open
air field grown ones. However, both are
really, really good! Next bright spot
was our Savoy cabbage. It
isn't only tender and tasty, it was stunning in appearance. More customers took
photos of our big Savoy cabbage than anything else at our market!
Now we are getting to the
TOWERING high-the MIRAI corn! After
listening to an ad last year for Illinois's Twin Garden Farms on Chicago's WGN (720) radio where they touted their MIRAI corn,
I decided to make a large test planting of MIRAI. I chose three varieties of MIRAI (75 day, 77
day and 79 day) and planted roughly a total of just below 2 acres. Despite the warnings by the MIRAI seed
producers that there were germination and early vigor problems with MIRAI the
corn grew wonderfully for us. Taking the
tip from Twin Garden Farms in Illinois we put out our own little advertising campaign which
included the MIRAI logo. Advertising
only helps in getting people to try something.
The product must be good to get return customers...and boy did we get
return customers seeking out MIRAI corn!
Don't confuse MIRAI corn with SuperSweet corn! While I did grow SuperSweet years ago I never
ate it. I thought it was absolutely
terrible, although some customers loved it, many didn't however. In our newsletter and with our discussions
with customers we mentioned that MIRAI might be too sweet for some tastes-and
it was. But it was roughly only one out
of twenty who felt this way. While it is
exceptionally sweet, it also has good sweet corn flavor and it is
tender-neither attribute of the old SuperSweet!
Our only problem was that despite the good yield we didn't have enough corn
to go around. Next year we plan on
doubling the size of our MIRAI and also make more consecutive plantings so they
ripen over an extended time.
Then came the squash!
While we have grown winter squash for many years we have never, ever had
such a bumper crop of beautiful squash that tasted so great! Almost as startling was the quantity of
squash we sold. During mid September we
looked over the squash patches and commented to ourselves that we wouldn't be
able to sell even half of the good quality, harvestable crop out there. Well, we beat that long ago and we estimate
we already sold 80% to 90% of the
harvested crop. If one looks over our large
piles of squash at our market you may not believe this, but it's true! We aren't only shocked; we are quite pleased!
The other bright spot have been the apples. We have a really good crop of nice apples-the
largest and best we have had in years.
Also our cooler, which uses the Smart A/C Room Controller (which I
discussed in an earlier newsletter) has been working as designed and, along
with our insulated cooler and room A/C,
has kept our apples in much better condition than in years past. Also related here is our new variety peck of
apples-this wasn't possible before the cooler was built. We have had many very nice comments about
this variety peck of apples where each apple is labeled and the peck comes with
a descriptive brochure of about 35 of our apples.
The last bright point that I
will mention here is this newsletter you are reading. This is just one of many of Annemarie's brilliant
ideas that turned out so well. (Another one that comes to mind immediately is
encouraging me to plant sunflowers-that idea was really great!) While I write this Boss's corner, and
Catherine is in charge of the photos and Rebekah along with Annemarie have
tested out the recipes mentioned in the
newsletter, Annemarie puts everything together, including recipes and editing,
and sends them out.
Okay, what about the problems
we have had. Two come to mind
immediately-late blight of tomatoes and that horrid Western Bean Cutworm which
didn't affect the beans but the corn. I
believe I already mentioned these problems in earlier newsletters so I will cut
it short.
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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