CSA Newsletter and Recipes 4-5
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Farm News and Recipes from Brandon (recipes below)
Greetings CSA members. After a week of warm weather and some serious harvesting, I am feeling a little tired (gasp) and will not produce the kind of prolix newsletter that you can either read in installments or maybe not even finish at all. Please enjoy, then, my laconic and straightforward retelling of the past week.
We clear-cut a few hundred heads of lettuce so that they would not bolt. What the pituitary gland does for teenage boys, a late spring heat spell will do for heirloom lettuces. A head of batavian lettuce will begin to stretch skyward and turn bitter in just a few days. Because taste correlates with nutritional properties, conveniently, harvesting lettuce at the right time ensures attractive, healthy and delicious vegetables. We watch the fields for any signs that the lettuces aspire to heights greater than, say, eleven inches maximum, and we cut them before this point. If they start to resemble vegetative light sabers, we still cut them, but leave them in the path to decompose.
Also this week we continued to thin several beds of beets and carrots.To thin root vegetables requires little physical strength, but it does demand a kind of rare and mercenary contempt for average vegetables. Thinning carrots to a spacing of two inches in a densely seeded row benefits the carrots left behind. To speak numbers, we may thin half the carrots we sow, which is a hard concept to swallow if you believe in the synergistic value of teamwork, community, collectivism and other normative social practices among modern human beings. Those ideals are fine and dandy for human interaction, but they don't do the carrot much good. A carrot is the Howard Roark of the vegetable world. It grows best if you give it space and solitude. I can't imagine a human being asking her neighbors to go away for the sake of her own personal growth and devlepment. However, for vegetables, cull we must. I had a hard time with this attitude when I first started farming. Telling you that we believe strongly in the highest organoleptic properties of vegetables in order to fully realize the European farm model might not mean much. Telling you to enjoy the incredible carrots in this week's share might mean a little more.
I hope you loved the three squash in the share this week. Because the fruits can grow over an inch per day, we harvested squash four times, the last harvest of over 100 pounds handled solely by farmer Justin. Besides harvesting the actual squash, we also pay close attention to the plants and remove any that appear diseased by way of the squash bug. This bug looks like a true stink bug and also stink (of a Sherwin Williams store to be frank). If growing good tomatoes is a game of skill and technology, then growing good squash is a game of volume and attrition. We know that eventually we'll lose most of the plants to disease every couple of days, so removing the plants to a secret stash a mile down the road mitigates the threat of rampant fungal outbreak and maximizes total harvest.
On Thursday I experienced my first garlic harvest. Paige, Natalie, Sarah and I deracinated a few hundred bulbs of garlic, tied them up in trelissing twine and carted these bundles to the intern garage where we hung them from the rafters. A few grams of field remain in my ears after standing under the dirty garlic, but you might be more interested to know what remains in the field.
In the old garlic field, we often find bits of pottery, random trinkets, arrowheads or other lithics and debitage and, strangely, and endless supply of shoe heels. When an archeaologists looks at a site like this, she can identify known items that help in order to understand a past culture. As eaters, we can understand ourselves by the items we eat. Pay close attention to how and what you eat and the relationship to the fitness of your body and mind. I hope that eating our vegetables at some point is not only social and environmentally sound, but also healthful to you on a personal level.
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This week's share:
1 cauliflower or broccoli 1/2 lb sugar snap peas 1 bu basil 3 heads lettuce 1 bu Chinese cabbage 1 bu green onions 1 bu carrots 1 bu chard Squash/zucchini 2 Kohlrabi (eat the tops, eat them raw or cooked, peel them)
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Creamy Kohlrabi Soup |
Kohlrabi
has always been a popular Eastern European vegetable since it tolerates
frost well and can be stored a long time in a root cellar. The bulbs
come in white and purple varieties. The white are more flavorful and
tender when small and have a hint of radish and cucumber flavors.
Purple Kohlrabi tends to have a slightly spicier flavor.
Because this soup contains only vegetables (but there is dairy!), it's a light way to start a multicourse meal. Makes 4 servings of Kohlrabi Soup
Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 20 minutes Ingredients: 2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 pound kohlrabi bulbs, peeled and chopped
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
2 1/2 cups milk
1 bay leaf
Salt and black pepper
Preparation:
Melt butter in a large pan with a lid. Add onions and cook gently until soft, about 10 minutes. Add kohlrabi and cook 2 minutes.
Add vegetable stock, milk and bay leaf to pan, and bring to a
boil. Cover, reduce heat to low and simmer 25 minutes or until kohlrabi
is tender. Let cool a few minutes and remove bay leaf.
Using an immersion blender
or conventional blender or food processor, puree soup until smooth. You
may want to strain the soup through a fine sieve if the kohlrabi is
especially fibrous. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve in
heated bowls with hearty bread of choice.
Note: If your kohlrabi come with the green tops, blanch them and
clean as you would for spinach, stripping the leaves down off the tough
center stem. Roll the leaves and slice across as for a "chiffonade" of basil.
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Cream of Carrot Soup
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� C vegetable oil
1 bunch carrots, cut into small pieces
� yellow onion, diced
� C dry white wine
a bouquet garni (There is no generic recipe for bouquet garni, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Depending on the recipe, the bouquet garni may include basil, burnet, thyme, chervil, rosemary, peppercorns, savory and tarragon. Sometimes vegetables such as carrot, celery (leaves or stem), celeriac, leek, onion and parsley root are also included in the bouquet.)
salt & pepper to taste
2 C water
1 C cream
2 T honey
champagne or sherry vinegar to taste knock of butter
This is a great soup that benefits from a few
careful techniques and a general understanding of soup construction. Read the
recipe carefully before beginning. The difference between a great soup and a
good soup is finesse. In this recipe, you want to build a really sweet puree to
which you will add water and cream at the end.
Heat a medium sauce pan or saute pan slightly, add
the oil, let this heat and add the diced onion. Add a pinch of salt (Salting
along the way is preferable to salting all at once near the end). Let the onions
cook on low heat until they are melted and sweet. We are trying to coax as much
sugar from the onions as possible, and rushing this step will handicap the soup
from step one. Take care not to burn the onions.
Add the chopped carrots and white wine. Let the
wine reduce by half. This step concentrates the sugars in the wine and also
cooks the carrots. Do add water if the vegetables begin to look dry or could
burn.
Add enough water to cover the carrot and onion,
place a bouquet garni in the pan. Let the mixture cook for about 15 minutes
more, reducing slightly.
Remove the bouquet garni and puree the vegeables
in a blender or food processor. If you have a tamiz or sieve, pass the blended
mixture through this to remove any odd sized particles, which further refines
the soup.
At this point, add water and cream to desired
consistency. Add honey and let that dissolve. Salt and pepper to taste. You may,
of course, subsitute other dairy products.
Add a splash of sherry vinegar and a knock of
butter to finish the soup. Be careful not to overdo the sherry vinegar. We are
looking for flavor and a background hint of acidity. You don't want to taste the
vinegar, but you want to know it is there. The knock of butter smooths out the
soup. If you have any questions about how to prepare this recipe, email Brandon at [email protected].
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Pasta of Lump Crab and Summer Squash
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A year ago tonight I cooked this dish about 40
times in a row at Fig Restaurant in Charleston, SC. It was our top seller almost
every night and was featured in a few magazines, so I hope you'll give it a try.
Take care with the buerre monte, a tricky yet useful addition to your culinary
repertoire. The French Laundry's cookbook has a detailed explanation of how,
when and why to utilize buerre monte.
1# prepared pasta such as potato agnolotti (what
we used) or a mild cheese ravioli or small shape pasta
1 C buerre monte with a few drops of truffle oil
added
1 squash, diced or halved and then sliced into
medialunas on a mandoline or by hand
A few squash blossoms if you can find them or have
them in the garden. Cut up and tossed in at the end, they are a sexy addition.
1# jumbu lump or claw crabmeat, picked through for
shell fragments.
1 bunch chives, sliced into 1 mm lengths (about 3
T)
Salt to taste
Boil pasta ahead of time and reserve
Make the buerre monte (if unfamiliar, look it up)
and add a few drops of truffle oil. Do not, do not overdo the truffle oil. It's
there, but not there.
Prep the squash.
To a saucepan, add a small amount of water and
bring to a boil. Add squash and cook until almost done. Add crab meat and heat
thoroughly (it is already cooked). Add buerre monte and pasta. Coat everything
and corrrect for salt.
Just before serving, toss in the chives and squash
blossoms if you have them.
Serve.
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