Week 13; beach it up and Food, Inc.

Yes!  This is a picture of the beach where we will be this Thursday!  We are very excited to be able to go away for the day, to take a dip in the ocean, to read a book on the sand (under shade of course) for a few hours, and to take a nice walk while getting our feet wet.  It has been fairly hot this past week; some days we leave the farm around lunchtime and take an inside break for a few hours until it cools off and then return to working in the field til' dusk.  We are probably more efficient that way as we slow down a little when it gets above 90.

Another very exciting thing for us this week is that we are going to see FOOD, INC. tonight at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.  Not only a mid-week outing, but an informative documetary covering the nature of our profession as well.  Awesome.  We encourage you all to see it as well and we have put a link to it in a blog post under this one if you're interested.  The more informed we all are, the better.
We'd love to hear how you all are feeling about the CSA at this point....we'll do a survey at the end, but are you feeling satisfied?  Too much of anything?  Not enough of some items? Let us know if you get a chance, we're always up for improvement and making our members' bellies happy and flowers enjoyed.  In your boxes this week:

half shares

Slicing tomatoes (heirlooms, big beef reds, pink girls)

pint of cherry tomatoes

lettuce mix

eggplant

2 green carmen peppers (these taste just like green bell peppers)

2 mole green peppers

pint of padron peppers

Full Shares

same as half with additional

slicing tomatoes

extra lettuce mix

extra mole peppers

RECIPES

So we were wondering what we be the best use for these beautiful mole peppers we're growing; they have a great taste....very thin and a great textured skin with just the faintest faintest hint of heat to them.  We had some cooked last night and we really like them.  We came up with the idea that they would be perfect for juevos rancheros.  Here is a great link to a recipe by Smitten Kitchen for juevos rancheros that of course looks delicious and has a couple items you can use from the CSA box.  Just substitute the mole peppers for the jalapeno.

Roasted Eggplant  We had some roasted eggplant last week and we really enjoyed it.  We just sliced up the eggplant into slivers or rounds, coated them with olive oil and salt, and baked them flat on a baking tray for 30 minutes on 400 degrees F.  

Another great recipe that a customer at market told me about was Sauteed Eggplant with Chives To cook, slice eggplant into thin rounds or slivers, heat a couple tablespoons of peanut oil over medium heat, and saute for 10-12 minutes.  Remove from heat and add a couple tablespoons of chopped up chives, some sea salt, and if you have it, some fish sauce for a more authentic asian flavor.  

Here is a nice and easy recipe from Martha Stewart for Tomato Salad with Olives and Lemon Zest.  I'm sure you could just as easily halve the cherry tomatoes and use them for this recipe with less of the other ingredients.  

Flower Shares

There are so many flowers blooming at Bluebird Meadows right now, I'm having trouble deciding what to make for you all.  There will most likely be some form of ornamental grass as we have some really beautiful jester grass (a cocoa/copper/green color) and some purple majesty millet (black with a millet plume) coming in right now.  I'll probably mix these grasses with either gladiolas or zinnias.  We hope you enjoy them, these grasses are one of my favorite.  

thanks everyone and have a great week!  

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change? - Trailer and Photos

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change? - Trailer and Photos

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Week 12

Hello CSA members! It seems every day of late we look at each other once a day and say, "Can you believe this weather?!" Unseasonable cool and mild. We'll take it. We got a half inch of rain Monday. This is perfect for us seeing as how we sowed a cover crop of sudan grass last week. It was a much needed rain (and we got to take a much needed nap!), and now we can get in and till to get everything ready for this fall. We have started kale, collards, cauliflower, lettuce mix, and carrots so far. Sometime in early August (if there is a cool spell) we will sow radishes and turnips in hopes to have them sometime in Sept. We hope to have some cool season items in your last boxes so that everyone gets a sense of the cycles we go through with crops.
Another crop we have that is almost ready for you all is edamame (the Japanese word for soybeans). They are a delicious and nutritious snack or appetizer and are very easy to cook. We are hoping to have them next week, but they may come in for box 14 seeing how cool it looks to be this week.
IMPORTANT REMINDER: We would like to again apologize to our Falconbridge members who did not receive their flowers due to an oversight on our part. This week their will be a bucket of oriental lily bouquets that will be labeled EXTRA FLOWER BOUQUETS for the members who didn't get them last week. Please take one of these in addition to the other bouquets made up for you all. Thanks for your understanding and patience!

In your boxes this week
half shares
2 lbs heirloom tomatoes
eggplant
2 green peppers (all taste like green bell)
cherry tomatoes
salad mix

full shares
extra heirloom tomatoes
extra eggplant
basil
Recipes
Seeing as this is peak tomato season right now, we think a couple tomato recipes are appropriate here. We just got the new Gourmet in the mail, and there are some great recipes in it; we hope they look enticing to you all as well. This soup looks really good; we plan on making it this weekend.
Roasted Tomato Soup with Parmesan Wafers (from Gourmet, August 2009)
Garlic Tomato Sauce (also from Gourmet, August 2009) If you have any garlic around from the former boxes, this recipe calls for two whole heads! I think putting the green peppers in (maybe just one of them) would make it even more delicious.

For the more adventurous, also from the new Gourmet......Vodka Spiked Cherry Tomatoes with Pepper and Salt
remember that you have two pints of cherries, so you won't need as much vodka.
Simple Sauteed Eggplant We hope you all have tried and enjoyed the eggplant by now. These small eggplant you're getting in the boxes are very easy to cook. We don't bother with peeling or salting them as they are small and non-bitter. That is why we grow these small varieties--to make things easier on the cooks in the kitchen.
Cut eggplant into rounds or thin slices going from stem to end (remove stems of course)
Heat 2 tbsp olive oil over medium high heat in a saute pan
(you could add optional garlic, 2-3 cloves, and we usually add 1 tbsp of butter to add some depth of flavor as well)
Add eggplant, sprinkle with around 1 tsp salt
Saute until eggplant has softened (around 10 minutes)
Eat and enjoy!

FLOWER SHARES
This week you will receive celosia bouquets. This is a heat loving flower whose word origin comes from the Greek word 'kelos' which means something along the lines of 'burning' or 'to burn'. A lot of people call it the brain flower as it looks like a brain when it gets big; it also can look like coral. We may mix it with some other flowers in an arranged bouquet. We hope you enjoy it!



Thanks everyone, and if you have any questions or comments, please let us know. Have a great week!!!

Week 11

I think we may have to call this week eggplant week! Yes, the eggplant have started to come in strong enough to cover all of our CSA members, so this week everyone will receive one of the five varieties we are growing. We have fairy tale, the beautiful purple and white striated variety; hansel and gretel, the small black and white eggplant that look very similar to asian eggplant but are smaller; kermit eggplant, the small green globes that are about 2 inches in diameter; and last but not least nadia, your typical large black globe eggplant that most people are accustomed to cooking. Have no fear of these beautiful vegetables. When cooked properly, eggplant quickly rise to the top of the best tasting vegetables around. We'll have more on them in the recipe section.
Another exciting vegetable to show up recently in the garden---red peppers! It'll still be a few weeks before there are enough for you all, but they are most definitely worth getting excited about. We had two chopped up in our omelets for Sunday brunch and we were in food heaven. Most likely next week you will get a couple green peppers to tide you over until they ripen red/orange/yellow.
This past week has been a week of budgeting for us. We're trying to figure out what all we can plant this fall in terms of perennial fruits and vegetables. We'd really like to put in some blueberry bushes for our future CSA, asparagus, and also some woody cut flowers like pussywillow, hydrangea, viburnum, and more peonies. But all of these things are expensive, so we're trying to prioritize. At the same time we're trying to get our house up, so it has been very hard trying to figure out what is most important. Bathroom tiles, or a small hoophouse for flowers? Decisions, Decisions. Whenever I'm faced with a decision that I'm completely stalling on, I remember a part in one of my favorite movies, Touching the Void, a true story about a mountain climber who fell on a climb with a broken leg into a glacial crevasse and managed to work his way back to his base camp that was probably five miles away. He says at some point during the film that no matter what had happened to him, if he wanted to stay alive, he had to keep making decisions, even if they were the wrong ones, if he wanted to get anywhere and stay alive. I think we'll stay alive if we can't decide on blueberries or asparagus, but hopefully you get the gist here.....
In your boxes this week:
Half share
2 lbs of heirloom tomatoes
2 pints cherry tomatoes
1 pint of eggplant
1 pint padron peppers
1/2 lb lemon cucumbers
Full-Share
same as half with extra
melons, cantaloupe and watermelon
extra pint of padrons or eggplant, whichever we have more of on Wed.

RECIPES
Marinated Eggplant with Mint from Epicurious.

Eggplant Caviar from Alice Waters' Art of Simple Food
Preheat oven to 400F.
Slice eggplant into 1/4 inch thick rounds.
Sprinkle the cut surfaces with: salt, fresh ground black pepper, olive oil.
Place cut side down on a baking sheet and roast until soft. Test for doneness near the stem end: the eggplant should be very soft. Remove from the oven and let cool. Scrape the flesh out of the skins into a bowl and stir vigorously to loosen into a puree.
Add: 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
salt
fresh ground pepper
1 garlic clove, peeled and pounded to a puree
2-4 tbsp chopped parsley or cilantro, or mint
Mix well and taste, adding more salt and lemon as needed.

Martha Stewart's Spicy Sesame Eggplant
Sara Foster's Heirloom Tomato Salsa as follows
makes 3-4 cups
2 lbs heirloom tomatoes, cored and diced
1 small red onion, minced
2 jalapeno peppers, cored, seeded and minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
grated zest and juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp white vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup fresh chopped cilantro leaves
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Place tomatoes, onion, jalepeno peppers, garlic, red pepper, lime zest and juice in a large bowl as you prepare them. Drizzle with olive oil and vinegar, sprinkle with the sugar, cilantro, salt and pepper, and toss gently to combine. Taste for seasoning and add more salt and pepper as desired. Cover and refridgerate for atleast 2 hrs to marry the flavor. Will keep for up to 1 wk.

Flower Shares this week I'm not 100% sure as of now what will be in the arrangements, but I'm thinking globe amaranth, celosia, and possibly a couple stems of lovely lisianthus. We also have a bunch of lilies coming on, so it may be another week of orientals, this time with a pink stem to go with the white.

Thanks everyone and enjoy your veggies and flowers!

Week Ten, our Mid-Way Point

Yes, it is already week ten. I had typed in week nine and then had to think to myself, no Alice, this is the half-way point. It's just gone by so fast it's hard to fathom being here already! We hope everyone is enjoying being with us and trying out all of the variety of produce and flowers we grow. Every year we learn so many things and see more clearly how we can improve our production, so we trust you all to have patience with our farming skills and we of course thank you for that patience. You all have so far been a delightful CSA, so we'd like to thank you for that as well.
This past weekend for the 4th of July we were able to go on a little mini-vacation up to Oxford and Annapolis, Maryland where Stuart spent his childhood. We had an awesome time and stayed on his parent's boat, sightseeing and enjoying being on the water, being away from the farm. We were blessed with a whole inch of rain while we were away, a perfect amount to water everything and keep it healthy. We are now able to get into the soil and till this week, a crucial step as we try to get in summer cover crops to keep the soil healthy. We are excited to say that while we were gone a summer crop of salad mix has germinated and, if everything goes well, you should all be seeing that in your boxes in a few weeks.
We have had quite a few inquiries as to what the pale yellow/white orbs have been in the boxes.....these are called lemon cucumbers and we hope you like them. We have some customers at the market who are crazy about them and we can never seem to have enough for everyone. They don't really taste like a lemon, but they do kind of look like lemons. You eat them as you would a regular cucumber....with a little salt, or a splash of vinegar, or cut up in rounds on a sandwich, in a salad, etc.
We are very sad to say that our melon crop has not been so great this year. We weeded them right before a 97 degree day and we think that made a lot of the vines on the plants wither up and die. We do have some melons, but are not of our usual size or quantity. Due to this fact we're going to have to give Falconbridge members melons this week and give Foster's members melons next week. Sorry about that! We also don't have enough of any one melon variety to give everyone the same type, so you will either get sunjewels (as pictured~kind of tastes like a honeydew), cantaloupe, or watermelon. They are all on the small side, so they'll be comparable prices. Again, we apologize for this but there is usually some crop that fails each year....atleast we have some small fries to give you all!!
In your boxes this week
Foster's
2 lb green beans (green and possibly yellow wax beans, eaten just like regular beans)
1 pint of cherry tomatoes
close to 2 lbs of heirloom tomatoes (possible varieties in you boxes are cherokee purple, pineapple, german johnson, valencia, green zebra, brandywine and big beef)
1 pint of padron peppers

Falconbridge
same as Foster's but instead of padrons you will get a small melon and some basil

Large Shares
we're not 100% sure yet what we'll have extra, but we're thinking:
a lb of cucumbers
extra pint of padrons
extra pint of cherry tomatoes

RECIPES
Smitten Kitchen does an incredible food blog, and here is a simple recipe for green bean cherry tomato salad.
Epicurious's Heirloom tomato salad with blue cheese
If you feel like getting fancy....epicurious's heirloom tomato tart recipe
Martha Stewart's Heirloom tomato salad with Garlic oil
Martha's Spicy Pickled Green and Wax Beans

These all look so good.....I think it's time to go make some dinner! Have fun with all your veggies everyone.

FLOWER SHARES
This week we have some AWESOME gladiolas for everyone, we think we'll put them with some love grass and a sunflower as a mixed bouquet.

Thanks everyone~ have a great week and we'll talk to you soon!!