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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Volume Two, Issue Eight
| Sunday - July 4, 2010
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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 July 5th. 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 - July 5th to July 10th
This week we are featuring tender green beans, new red potatoes, sweet red
beets, SunSugar cherry tomatoes, zucchini and a variety of potted herbs. Also our craft room is now open! Here you can find handmade jewelry, art,
gourd crafts, knitting, rosaries and more!
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From The Kitchen
Vinegars
Last year we talked about the differences in the quality of vinegars you find at the grocery store. A reader mentioned a good point about apple cider vinegar so I figured I would revisit the vinegar issue.
There are two ways to produce vinegars - from fruits and grains or from petroleum byproducts. I try to read the labels on most everything I buy to reduce or eliminate those additives that are questionable or dangerous or those I just get a weird feeling about. Add petroleum products to my cooking is one of those things I get a weird feeling about. For cooking we pretty much stick to Heinz as those vinegars are made from fruits and grains. The cheaper vinegars are usually made from the petroleum byproducts. You can find out the origin by reading the labels - if they don't tell you what the vinegar is made from, it is probably petroleum.
I also just learned that some of the big jugs of apple cider vinegar are just white vinegar flavored or colored to look like apple cider vinegar. We have used some of those big jugs of apple cider vinegar and things didn't turn out exactly right. This is probably why!
We stick to the quart jars of Heinz vinegars for cooking and canning.
So the bottom line is READ THE LABELS if using vinegars derived from petroleum in your cooking concerns you.
Grilled Beets
One of the most popular way to cook beets at our house during the summer is on the grill. Several methods have been tried and the following are the ones we like the best. These recipes don't call for any seasoning but remember you can season yours to taste. You might even want to experiment and try different seasoning combinations.
Quick Grilled Beets
Remove leaves from beets and clean under running water. Peel
and slice beets into quarters; if your beets are on the smaller side,
keep them whole. Place beets in pot and fill with enough water to
cover. Bring to boil and boil for ten minutes. Drain into colander and
transfer to a long sheet of aluminum foil. Wrap into small packages and
seal securely. Don't make packages too large, you need to maneuver them
easily when grilling! With tongs, move packages to prepared grill and
place over indirect heat. Grill for 10-20 minutes, or until fork
tender.
Smokey Grilled Beets
Remove
leaves from beets and clean under running water. Peel beets and keep
whole. With tongs, place beets on grill over indirect heat. Grill for
30 minutes or until fork tender. Move beets to direct heat and grill
for 10 minutes more.
Green Bean RecipesSince we are into bean season, we featured beans in a couple of meals this week. Friday evening we had baked potatoes and green beans in cheese sauce. Earlier in the week we had fried chicken tenders and garlic green beans. Both of these side dishes are very tasty! Last year in our July 18th newsletter, we featured a green bean recipe that included bacon and brown sugar (YUM!). You can check out that recipe here. But I also have the other two recipes for you this week. adapted from myrecipes.com
1 1/2 pounds green beans, trimmed
1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons olive oil 3 garlic cloves, minced 2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon black pepper Cook green beans in boiling water for 5 minutes or until tender; drain. Plunge into cold water to stop cooking process and drain again. Melt butter with oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat; remaining ingredients and beans. Saute for 4-5 minutes or until throroughly heated. My notes: - Most recipes call for green beans to be cooked until crisp tender. If you follow the timing in this recipe, that is what you will get. However I do have some who prefer their beans more tender so boiling about 2-3 more minutes will give you a softer bean.
- We don't have any of our garlic yet so I substituted granulated garlic - I used about 1 1/2 teaspoons.
Magicland Green Beans in Cheese Sauce
2 bags Magicland green beans 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 3/4 pound processed American cheese 2 tablespoons margarine 1/2 teaspoon onion powder 1 teaspoon granulated garlic 1/2 teaspoon black pepper 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
Fill medium pot with water, set on stove and heat. Snap or cut off both ends of beans. Wash beans.
After water comes to a boil, put salt and beans in pot. Allow water to come to a boil again. Then cook beans for 7 minutes. Time can be longer depending on personal preference and tenderness of beans. Remove from heat and drain.
Combine all remaining ingredients in large saucepan or double boiler over medium heat. Stir until cheese is melted and mixture is smooth.
Add beans to sauce and stir until beans are heated through.
My notes: - Again, the cooking time for cooking the bean should be adjusted to your taste preferences. 3-5 minutes will give you a crisp-tender bean. The longer you cook it the softer it becomes. Feel free to adjust the time to your preferences.
- This makes a great sauce. We had baked potatoes with the beans and the sauce tastes great over the baked potatoes as well.
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Specials In The Spotlight
Our special early season price for green beans will be $10 a ½ bushel
AND only $18 a full bushel (2 halfs). The best way to reserve some is to email us at magiclandfarms@yahoo.com
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Questions Our Customers Are Asking
In this section, we usually answer the most commonly asked questions by customers at the stand and via email. If you have any questions, email us and we'll do our best to answer.
This week we have a question about the acreage of the farm. We often get asked about how many acres we have for growing the produce we sell. The answer is that we have about 30 acres in vegetables and about 10 in fruit. About 16 acres of the 30 vegetable acres are devoted to sweet corn.
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The Boss's Corner
Well, I entered the latest weather data into the Sweet Corn
Planting Scheduler software program and it is now showing that the first corn
will be ready for picking on July 11. No
doubt this "day later forecasted ripening date" was due to the cool nights this
past week. It is interesting to note
that if I entered the forecasted temperatures for last week last Sunday, the
software would have put out a July 11th date! Realizing this, I have put in the forecasted
temperatures for the coming week and the software spit out a new earlier date -
July 9th! This is because
this week the temperatures are expected to be a bit above normal! When will we start picking sweet corn? July 9th, 10th or 12th? Our advertised date is the 12th to
be on the safe side. My best guess now
is July 10th. I tell you what
we are going to do! You guys who read
this newsletter are in the "in" group and so we are going to send out a special
newsletter in the evening (after 9PM)
of the day before we start picking. The
day we send out the newsletter could be as early as Thursday (July 8th) or as late as Sunday the 11th. By the way, the first corn will be a bi-color
and its ears will be of average size-which is quite a bit larger than our first
corn of years past. Its quality is quite
good.
An Interesting Note,
Right Out of the Twilight Zone, About a Customer's Comment About our Website
or, more accurately, our Websites! (Note: While accurate in substance, this
story has been edited and details have been changed!)
A few days ago
someone mentioned at our market that they got a new computer and found
something spooky. When she looked at our
website on the new computer she saw our new revised website. Then when she went back to her old computer she
saw a completely different website-it was the old one! She got this creepy feeling and wasn't sure
what was going on. Well, unless you
consider computers and the internet are already in the Twilight Zone (which
they just might be) what was going on has to do with the problems we are having
with Yahoo. Our old website was hosted
by Yahoo's geocities division. Over a
year ago Yahoo was phasing out (we were told) the geocities division so we
completely revised our website (actually Catherine did all the work) and moved
it to Fat Cow. However, Yahoo didn't
delete the website despite the fact that we were no longer charged (that's
another complicated story) and despite the fact that a number of times we asked
them to remove it from their servers! Here is what likely happened. The
gal that thought she had entered the Twilight Zone everytime she used her old
computer probably clicked on a "favorites" button on the oldie which has a URL
that included geocities. If you are
having the similar problem simply go to the straightforward address-forget old
favorites or bookmarks-that is www.magiclandfarms.com. Replace the old favorites/bookmarks with this. We are still trying to have Yahoo get rid of the old website. Trust me!
Cut Sunflowers and
Other Stuff We Will Be Picking Soon
It appears our first planting of sunflowers will be ready
for cutting the end of this week. Also
late next week we will start picking our yellow(wax) beans and we will start
selling ½ bushels of green beans. Email
orders for ½ bushels of green beans sent to magiclandfarms@yahoo.com, at least
two days in advance, will normally be accepted. Our special early season price for green beans will be $10 a ½ bushel
AND only $18 a full bushel (2 halves). This price will likely rise in a week or two since we will have many
more things to harvest and no more time to harvest them. Next week our Little Red tomatoes will probably
be ready. While small (you can think of
them as jumbo sized red cherry tomatoes) they can be sliced and are as tasty as
our best large red slicing tomatoes, which should start in about two
weeks. By the way, our supply of those
really tasty and sweet SunSugar cherry tomatoes is increasing. We have been enjoying them eaten as is AND
slicing them in half and putting them on burgers and other sandwiches. For
those sweet corn lovers, we should have a really good supply of bi-color corn
by the 13th of July and our light yellow Spring Treat sweet corn
will start a few days later. For those
who are into freezing and canning corn I would wait until our Bon Appetit
bi-color is ready starting the week of July 19th. This large eared
corn is perhaps my favorite corn and so I made four plantings of this one
variety. In all, we have made 34
plantings of sweet corn (Plus plantings of Indian Corn, popcorn and field corn
for shocks in the far NW corner of the property near the curve into 40th-there
is a small white Magicland Farms sign there.) so far and there are about five
more to come. Although we hope to have
corn until frost, our supply will rapidly dwindle after Labor Day since the small
size of the plantings will make the supply of late September corn get smaller
and smaller and smaller although the corn earworms will likely get bigger and
bigger and bigger...
Nashle!
Tom
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This week's photo album
This year we are doing our photos for the newsletter a bit differently. Due to space constraints on our newsletter hosting service and concern for those of you on a dialup connection, we are going to host them on Drop.io (a web based file sharing service). Every week you will get a link to a photo album that shows the photos that go along with the newsletter. Simply click on the link below and it will take you to the photos. Clicking on a photo will yield a larger image along with a description of the photo.
This Weeks Photos 07-04-2010
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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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