| What's Growing This Week: | |
Navel Oranges
Minneola Tangelos
Butternut Squash
Spinach
Green Garlic
Cabbage
Fennel(S)
Carrots (M,L)
Bunched Spinach (M,L)
Escarole (M,L)
Oroblanco (M,L)
Chard (L)
Leeks (L)
Items may be substituted without notice.
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Bulk Citrus
Get one or more 6 1/2 pound boxes of navel oranges, one time or every week for the duration of the season. You can get bulk citrus or make changes to your current bulk citrus subscription through your account management page. |
Contact Us:
| terrafirmafarm.com
csa@terrafirmafarm.com
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| CSA Rates 2011 | Boxes are charged on Monday for the week's deliveries at:
$14 Small
$24 Medium
$32 Large
For a payment of $300, get a 3% bonus. Your account balance will be $309.
For a payment of$850, get a 5% bonus. Your account will be posted as $892.00
For a payment of $1,400, get a 7% bonus. Your payment will be posted as $1,498.
Vacations are charged weekly when notice is given as a fee, no charges occur during the vacation week.
$4 Small
$8 Medium
$11 Large
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Pledge of Authenticity
Terra Firma is a real farm. We grow 99% of the produce that goes into our boxes on our 220 acres of certified organic land in Winters. If we do buy produce from other farms, it's almost always from a neighboring farm and we give them full credit in the box list.
The owners of Terra Firma are involved in every aspect of making your boxes a reality: walking the fields, planting the crops, selecting and checking what goes in the boxes and finally delivering them to you. We eat the crops from our fields every day, just like you do. Thanks for supporting our efforts and enjoying the food we grow.
Paul, Pablito, & Hector
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Payments, Billing, and Changes
| Schedule vacations, change box sizes, make payments or sign up for autopay by logging in to your subscriber account at terrafirmafarm.com
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News From Terra Firma Farm
Community Supported Agriculture |
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Greetings!
Planning our your weekly boxes is always a central activity of our week here at Terra Firma, starting the prior week and continuing into Monday and Tuesday. Paul Holmes and our Harvest Manager Efrain spend several hours checking the fields to see what is ready to harvest and estimating how much of each crop we have. Then we factor in customer preferences and crops that we have in storage.
This is often a challenging task. Sometimes it is difficult to narrow the list down from all the produce we have available. There are weeks when we go through several draft box lists before we settle on the one that seems the best.
March 2012 is not one of those times. Late winter is always a time of scarcity at Terra Firma, and this year that time has come earlier than normal. So assembling the box list feels more like a scavenger hunt -- exploring the fields in the hope of finding something that may have grown more quickly than we expected, or something that we forgot was there (yes, that does actually happen!).
This week, we discovered some goodies in a field that we have not harvested since the big freeze of early January. There, we found escarole, frisee and treviso radicchio that have regrown from the roots after the freeze damaged the original plants -- much the same way as last week's fennel did.
Searching through weedy, forgotten fields is not really farming as it is generally practiced in California. It's more akin to mushroom hunting or clam digging, where experience and historical memory guide you to a place where you are very likely to find the food treasure you are looking for. These are human experiences that predate agriculture completely, that light up synapses that kept our ancestors alive as hunter-gatherers many thousands of years ago.
You'll be seeing these "semi-wildcrafted" greens from our abandoned fields in your boxes over the next couple of weeks, starting today with Escarole. We hope their very slight bitterness sparks something inside that connects you to the humans of long ago. Or at least that they make a nice late winter salad.
Thanks,
Pablito
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In Your Boxes
The Escarole in your boxes today is fairly mild tasting and very well blanched. The heart of each head is full of crisp, lettucy leaves that are perfect for a salad like the one in the recipe. The outer leaves with less blanching might be better used cooked.
You may notice some light brown edges on the tops of the leaves. This is called "tip burn". It is caused by cold, but is easy to remove by cutting the tips of the leaves off. In general with escarole, the tops of the leaves are the least desirable part anyway, since they tend to be more bitter than the lower parts.
With it's tight heads, escarole is a magnet for silt and should be carefully and thoroughly washed before using: remove/separate all the leaves and soak in water. After draining, check the base of the leaves for dirt and rinse them individually if necessary.
I know a few weeks back I said you were getting the last Butternut Squash of the season in your boxes, but it turns out I was wrong. I hope this is a pleasant surprise. As I mentioned last time, you should probably store this butternut in your fridge until you use it and not at room temperature.
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Recipe -- Chopped Chicory Salad
I'm eating this salad as I type. The recipe requires avocado, which we don't grow, and lemons, which we ran out of two weeks ago. I usually don't put recipes requiring multiple "outside" produce items, but I made an exception here because this salad is so delicious. You can use escarole, frisee or treviso radicchio. If you don't have beans and don't want to cook them, chopped hard boiled eggs would also work.
If you don't want to use canned beans, you will need to soak 1 C. cannellini beans overnight and then cook until tender.
Remove the greens from 1 stem of green garlic and chop them (reserve the white part for another use). Toss with the juice of 1 lemon and let sit for 10-15 minutes. Add 3 T. olive oil and 1/2 an avocado, mashed. Whisk or blend to make a creamy dressing. Season with salt and pepper.
Separate 1 or 2 heads of escarole, frisee, or treviso radicchio into individual leaves. Soak them in a basin or bowl of water and then rise the leaves individually if the bases still are silty.
Spin dry and chop roughly or tear. You want about 6 cups of leaves, loosely packed.
Toast 3 slices of levain or other crusty bread. Chop or tear into bite-sized pieces.
Grate Reggiano Parmesan to make 1/2 C.
Toss the greens and dressing together until nicely coated, then add 1 C. cooked, drained cannellini beans and the toasted bread. Top with the parmesan, then do another quick toss and serve.
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Recipe -- Fennel SlawThis recipe is especially for Small box subscribers, who got a head of fennel in their boxes this week (everyone else got it last week). It's a refreshing change from standard cabbage salad.
Trim the stalks and base from 1 head of fennel. Separate the head into individual sheaths and then wash them. Slice the fennel as thinly as possible cross wise. Cut a head of cabbage in half and then place one half cut side down. Shred the cabbage. You want roughly the same amount of cabbage as you have of shredded fennel. Make a dressing with 6 T. orange or tangelo juice, 2 T. walnut or sesame oil, salt and a tiny bit of cayenne pepper. Toss with the slaw and let sit for at least 15 minutes, stirring several times. Serve the slaw on top of baby spinach leaves topped with spicy toasted pumpkin seeds (available at natural food stores) and chevre or crumbled feta cheese.
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