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From Field to Table
What's Happening Now at Magicland Farms
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Volume Two, Issue Ten
| Sunday - July 18, 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 19th. 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 19th to July 24th
This week we are featuring Sweet Corn, both Bi-color and all yellow (we pick
sweet corn everyday except Sunday), green
and yellow beans, beets, pickling and slicing cucumbers, new red and Yukon Gold
potatoes, SunSugar cherry tomatoes, cut sunflowers, zucchini, carrots with tops
and more. Also our craft room is now open! Here you can find handmade jewelry, art,
gourd crafts, knitting, rosaries and more!
We accept both the Bridge Card and Project Fresh.
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From The Kitchen
Boiling and roasting are probably the most common methods for preparing sweet corn. Microwaving it is probably not far behind. However we have discovered that adding sweet corn to some dishes actually makes the dishes more tasty.
This past week I made beef tacos which is normally a popular entree in our house. The night before we had the tacos, we had boiled sweet corn. Quite a bit was left over since we filled two pots with the corn. Rather than waste it, we cut it off the cob and reserved it in the refrigerator. Adding the leftover corn to the tacos seemed like an idea that would make a good dish even better. I cooked the tacos as usual and added the corn at the end of the cooking time, just to warm the corn up. Everybody just loved the tacos with the sweet corn addition. If you wanted to stretch a taco dish, this is the way to do it. My next thought is to add corn to barbecue or sloppy joe sandwiches. I imagine it would go really well in either case. I will keep you posted on the results.
Also a couple of the kids came up with an addition to our usual omelets which involved corn as well. They sauteed some sweet corn in butter (a lot of butter as a matter of fact) and added the corn to the omelet along with cojack cheese. Boy was that good! All you need do is cut the kernels off the cob and saute in butter. You could season them if you like but I just loved the plain corn flavor in the omelet. I had my omelet with a side of SunSugar cherry tomatoes (see the photo in our gallery). It was a superb taste combination.
I also have added sweet corn to my basic lettuce salad and enjoyed it that way as well.
Here is a recipe for a cheesy corn that I made last year- everyone liked it and I plan on making it again this year.
Cheesy Creamed Corn
(serves 4)
16 ounces corn, cut off the cob
3 ounces cream cheese cut into cubes
1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon butter, cubed 1 tablespoon water 1 tablespoon milk 2 teaspoons sugar 2 slices of American cheese
Mix all in a greased casserole dish and place in preheated 300 degree oven. Bake until heated through and cheese is melted. Remember to stir occasionally. If I remember correctly it took about 30-45 minutes.
The next time I make this I am going to crush some Ritz crackers and top the casserole with them in the last few minutes of baking.
As you can see, there are more ways to prepare corn other than just boiling or roasting it.
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Specials In The Spotlight
Our special early season price for pickling cucumbers: 56 for $6.
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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.
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The Boss's Corner
Hi,
One of the perks of the long, hot summer we are having is
watermelons-they grow best when the temperature is in the low 90s during the
afternoon. This seems reasonable since
they originated in Africa. Since I felt we were going to have a summer
that was above normal in temperatures I planted more watermelon than
normal. If you are blasé about
watermelons, as I was once, it is most likely because you have never had
watermelons that are truly vine ripened. You see, watermelons like most fruit (bananas and some types of plums
and pears are exceptions) get sweeter and the flavor increases until the
moment they are picked. Since
commercially grown melons take so long to get from field to consumer, they are
picked green and the flesh turns red as they sit on trucks or in piles. You see, the melons continue to ripen-turn
from a light pink to deep red when they are just sitting. (Of course, they do
the same thing when on the vine but get better and better tasting, while on the
vine, until they are picked or become overripe.)
The Watermelon that
Made Me Fall In Love With Watermelons!
Many years ago when I was a teenager, I was returning to Chicago
with my parents after an Easter vacation. Well, for some reason we decided to stop at the famed Benton Harbor
Fruit Market which at the time had a retail operation. (Today, it seems to be solely a wholesale
operation where local farmers sell to Supermarkets and to some people who
resell the produce at Farmer's Markets and Roadside stands.) Well, while we were looking around, an old farm
truck (perhaps a ton truck) pulled into the market loaded with nice looking,
nearly round watermelon that were striped dark green/light green. (I found out
later these watermelons were likely the Crimson Sweet variety, which were new back
then.) I noticed the plates on the truck
were Florida ones and it appeared
the truck had come directly from some farm down there. (Remember, this was April and even local
asparagus wasn't ready yet.) The sun-burnt
driver obviously spent many hours outdoors and could well have been the grower
himself! My dad bought a melon. That was
a mistake! He should have bought ten
melons-that melon was oh, so good. Until
then that was the best tasting watermelon I ever had. Honestly, however, over half the melons I've
tasted that we have grown ourselves were even better!
I have been so enthused over watermelon and have had so much
experience growing them (they were the first fruit/vegetable I sold and I
hauled them then to markets in the trunk of my 1969 Buick Wildcat since I still
hadn't bought my first truck) that I have written and sold three different
articles on growing watermelon. I plan
on writing another since I learnt even more since the last article I had
published. If you want to take a look at
the article that was published in BackHome
magazine go to http://drop.io/OneOfMyWatermelonArticles.
There are several things I would like to change in the old
watermelon article. First off, there are
two types of cucumber beetles that cause problems-spotted and striped. The spotted is the adult form of the southern
corn rootworm and the striped, although it looks a bit like the western corn
rootworm, aren't the same beast. Also,
while we planted primarily Crimson Sweet watermelons this year, we didn't
plant any of the other varieties mentioned in the article. (By the way, while Crimson Sweet are supposed
to average between 15 and 25 pounds, a few years ago we picked a 56
pound beauty-and it was growing on beach sand soil, of all things!) What we
did plant, in addition to Crimson Sweet, was the Amish heirloom Moon and Stars,
which has yellow moons and stars all over its dark green skin. We also planted the yellow fleshed Desert
King-which is supposed to be drought tolerant (big surprise!)
While I mentioned the ice box sized Sugar Baby watermelon in
the article, I no longer grow it because of its relatively poor quality. What we now grow is the much better tasting
Jade Star and Lantha, which are both hybrids. These melons look like Sugar Baby -- relatively small with dark green
skin. Another hybrid ice box watermelon we are tryin' this year is Yellow
Doll. It has yellow flesh and is
supposed to be extremely sweet.
In the BackHome article I mention watermelon do well in dry
weather. This is true. However, I have found this is only true
because their roots go way down-often over 6 feet. Nonetheless, during extended dry weather when
the vines use up all the water in the first six feet they stop growing and just
peter out.
Me thinks we should have a few Jade Star, Lantha and Yellow
Doll melons ready by the weekend and by August 1 we should start to harvest our
large melons like Crimson Sweet, Moon and Stars and Desert King.
This year we are growing a few muskmelons on raised beds and
trying out trickle irrigation and plastic mulch on them. One reason we aren't big into muskmelons is
that moi likes watermelon better. Another
reason is that we planted them in the same type of soil we planted
watermelon-very sandy. This was a
mistake. Unlike watermelon which grows
well on the sandiest ground we have, muskmelons like richer ground, something like
sweet corn. We will see if we can get a
big enough yield this year to make them profitable.
Newaygo Newaygo Sweet
Onions
Two years ago our Newaygo Newaygo onions were a big
hit. We planted them again although this
time we didn't plant them in the fall in the field but rather started them in
our greenhouse in January and then transplanted them to the field in early
April. We tasted them and they are sweet
and very mild, just like they were in 2008. We plan on starting to harvest them this week. By the way, the seed company where we get
them calls them Walla Walla Sweet Onions but we know better! Newaygo Newaygo onions will only keep a few
weeks so they should be used soon after you buy them. Our Sweet Spanish onions-both yellow and
red-usually keep for us into February or even March. We will start pulling our Sweet Spanish
onions in August and we should have them all through the season, perhaps into
November.
Tomatoes
We've been picking the wildly
popular SunSugar cherry tomatoes for some time now. Also, we started to pick our 2 to 3 oz Little
Red tomatoes this past week. (Many think
the Little Reds are the best tasting red tomatoes there are.) We are just
starting to harvest our large red slicing tomatoes from the high tunnel. It looks to me our supply of tomatoes will
steadily increase this week and by the weekend we should have a fair
supply. Demand remains very high,
however, and I expect our supply of tomatoes in the afternoons won't be as
great as we like. If you want large red
tomatoes the best time to get a good selection is from 10:15 to 11:00
starting on Tuesday.
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 Week's Photos - 07/18/2010
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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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