Click here for the full PDF

In your box: Broccoli, arrowhead cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli leaf, salad mix, kohlrabi, garlic scapes, salad turnips.

News from the Farm

Welcome to Week 5. What a wonderful and busy week. We have another record breaking pizza night (we hit the 200 pizza mark) and Kim Casey taught a great class. You can find her hand out on the backside of this week’s newsletter if you missed it. Saturday we made hay, literally. It was late but we had a bountiful crop. Sunday was the pancake breakfast. Thanks to everyone who made it out. We loved seeing old friends and meeting new ones and we fed you all a whopping 40 lb of sausage, 25 dozen eggs (in fritatas), 4 gallons of apple sauce, 15 gallons of pancake batter, 160 cups of coffee and lots of milk, butter and syrup. It was surprisingly relaxing on our side as well.

Weeding season is still upon us but we feel like we might jump ahead in several weeks. We are preparing the ground with compost and making beds for the last planting of some summer crops like late snap beans, and for storage crops like fall carrots, beets, rutabaga and more. In other crop news the snap beans are flowering wonderfully getting ready to make beans, we have tiny zucchini on our plants and we harvested 3 ripe tomatoes. The next weeks should be filled with an increasing diversity of summer food.

Have a delicious week- Kat, Tony, Riley, Ted and Maple

Kat’s Kitchen

Garlic Scapes 101- They can be used just like garlic in any dish but are a little bit milder. They can be softened by sauting or turned into a garlic paste with olive oil and used as a cooking base. They are also great in pesto, sauteed with greens on high heat with lemon squeezed on top. Use the whole scape other than the tip when chopping. Smaller pieces cook faster and are less pungent, but garlic lovers sometime like bigger chunks. We have even seen some recipes for garlic scape tempura, and also love pickled garlic scapes.

Greens Pesto -Makes 1.5 cups, enough for 6-8 servings of pasta adapted from The Kitchn.com via CSA member Katie Kalish. 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, 8 ounces kale or other greens, trimmed, rinsed and chopped, 1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese , 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 4 cloves garlic, chopped (or 2-3 garlic scapes), 2 teaspoons lemon juice, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the nuts in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet and roast them in the oven until they are golden and fragrant, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Have a large bowl of cold water ready. Drop the chopped kale into the boiling water. When the water returns to a boil, swirl the kale around a few times until it becomes limp. Drain the kale and plunge it into the cold water. Drain again, then place the kale on a clean dishtowel and blot away the moisture. Place the nuts, kale, Parmesan, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, salt and pepper in a blender and puree until uniformly smooth. You may need to add more olive oil to reach desired consistency. To refrigerate, cover with plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pesto. Will stay fresh for up to 3 days. To freeze, place desired portions in small containers with plastic directly on the surface of the pesto, or place in plastic freezer bags, and freeze for up to two months.

Super Brassica salad – this week you have almost every crop in the brassica (cabbage) family. You can subtract one or more veggie from the mix. 1 head broccoli, 1 head cauliflower, 1 cups shredded turnips or broccoli stem or carrots, ¼ cup sunflower seeds, ½ cup dried currants or raisins, 2-4 tbsp fresh lemon juice, to taste, kosher salt, pepper to taste (1/4-1/2 tsp salt and lots of pepper), Pure maple syrup, to drizzle on before serving. Adapted from http://ohsheglows.com/. In a food processor (or chop by hand) process the broccoli (no stems) until fine. Add into large bowl. Now process the cauliflower (no stems) until fine and add into bowl. Do the same with the carrots/stems/turnips (on shredder). Stir in the sunflower seeds, currants, raisins. Add lemon juice and seasonings to taste. Drizzle with maple syrup to taste.

Greens Greens Greens ~ Cooking Outside The Box ~ June 2015

Raw Greens: Demo = Hummus ~ Garbanzo Beans, Tahini, Lemon, Garlic Scape, Raw Greens, Salt

Other places to sneak in raw greens:

Salads- obviously but not just green ones. Mayo based or pasta salads perhaps?
Pesto- super charge your pesto + stretch it out a bit by adding greens
Smoothies- my favorite is yogurt, berries, bananas, coconut H2O, protein, greens

Not Raw Greens: Demo = Sauteed Greens ~ Any Or All Greens, Garlic, Salt, Pepper

Cook your greens to the perfect spot then refrigerate for later use. Need ideas?

14 Ideas for incorporating your sauteed greens into other dishes.....

In your favorite quesadilla
In a quiche
In your morning egg scramble
In your favorite sandwich wrap
In your meatloaf or meatballs
On top of fish
In your favorite omelette
On a burger (beef, turkey, salmon, veggie...)
On top of a salad
In your taco meat
In your marinara / meat sauce
On a pizza
On a grilled cheese sandwich
Cold or hot just by itself or on top of rice, quinoa, pasta, orzo, risotto....

Seasonally Adjusting Recipes: Demo = Thai Inspired Stir Fry ~ Sauce= Red Curry Paste, Coconut Milk, Maple Syrup, Olive Oil, Lime, Basil, S&P Stir Fry= Bok Choy, Cabbage, Carrot, Greens

This recipe was adapted from a Thai-inspired sloppy joe that used ground lamb + spinach. We’ve omitted the meat and spinach and instead used what came in our CSA box this week to make it more local.. This is “Thinking Outside The Box”. Using seasonal ingredients in place of others. If a recipe calls for onion but you have leeks...try it...or garlic, or garlic scapes, or scallions...catch my drift? The original recipe also called for brown sugar. Instead we are using maple syrup, choosing a local sweetener instead of one that is not. The recipe won’t always taste exactly the same when you swap ingredients but what’s the fun in that?

Side Notes:

Not keeping up with your greens? Cook a giant pot of spaghetti or pizza sauce and at the very end throw some or all of your greens in the pot and immersion blend it all. Bonus: picky kids will never know!
- Don’t have an immersion blender? It’s a VERY useful kitchen tool but if you only have a blender or food processor, transfer some sauce from the pot to either one then add greens, grind them all up and send them back to the pot.

Curly Kale can be frozen raw. I just de-stem, tear into smaller pieces and freeze in small portions. This is perfect for soups and sauces later in the year when we don’t have fresh kale.
Speaking of freezing, though the season ask yourself this questions, “how can I freeze this?”.
- You can’t freeze cabbage (that I’m aware of) but you can make cabbage rolls or stuffed cabbage and freeze that.
- You can make soup and freeze that.
- If there is anything you aren’t keeping up with, consider chopping it up and freezing it. The best time this advice works for me is fall when we have celeriac. I chop it up along with carrots and onions (like mirepoix subbing celeriac for celery) and make soup starter packs that I again freeze in individual portions. Makes it so simple to start a pot of soup!