Week 8; August 22, 2013

What's in the box?

basil

beans (dragon tongue and green mix)

broccoli

summer squash/ zukes

sweet corn

bell peppers

eggplant

cucumber

green top carrots

heirloom and slicer tomatoes

melon (not pictured)

*cherry tomatoes are in some of the boxes and will be in different boxes next week*

basil

sweet corn

cauliflower (or broccoli or cabbage)

bell peppers

green top carrots

beans (dragon tongue and green mix)

summer squash/ zucchini

heirloom and slicer tomatoes

Notes on the box...

We bunched the basil this week. It will store well with the stems in a little vase or glass of water on your counter. This will make your kitchen smell nice! Key thing to remember with basil storage is don't let it get too cold and don't let the leaves get wet.

The dragon tongue beans are an heirloom variety and are SO GOOD! We grew them a few seasons ago and had split opinions on them, but this season they are tasting incredible. Maybe they like drastic swings in temperature! The only bad thing about them is that the beautiful purple stripes will go away when you cook them. I suggest a nice marinated bean salad with them to preserve the beauty, or try them with veggie dip!

Tomatoes We will be putting them in the boxes in as great a quantity as we can for as long as we can. We know they are a favorite of everyone, but it looks like this season will sadly be a short one for tomatoes. I guess we can all keep our fingers crossed for a late frost! DO NOT keep your tomatoes in the fridge! They will get mealy. Store them on your counter with the stem end down (on their shoulders). We try to pack a variety of ripeness so you have some tomato to enjoy now and some later.

The sugars in Sweet Corn begin to turn to starch as soon as the corn is picked. This means that you will have tastier corn the sooner you eat it. We prefer to eat sweet corn simply for the first couple of days after picking. Just bring some water to a boil, husk the corn and remove the silk, then drop the ears into boiling water for 3 minutes. Remove from the water and serve right away with butter and salt (or a farm favorite, a little Umeboshi Plum Paste!). If you plan on making corn fritters, corn bread, or adding the corn to soup, you can use the corn that you’ve had waiting in the fridge. Sweet corn stores best in the husk in the crisper of your fridge.

These Green Top Carrots are part of our crop swap with Burning River Farm. They will be getting melons from us. These carrots are just so tasty and beautiful! We hope you enjoy them as much as we do! Storage note: remove the tops from the carrots and store them in a plastic bag. If you don't take off the tops, the carrots will get bendy and not crisp pretty quickly. We've read that the tops are edible, though we have yet to find a way to eat them that we really enjoy :( Any members with suggestions, please send them our way via email or in the comments, please!!

Recipes...

Lots of links week...

Summer Corn Salad Thanks so much to long time members Rob and Susan for this recipe! They said it could have been the entire meal! Yum!

Green Bean Salad with Goat Cheese Dressing

Raw Green Bean Salad

Carrot Crust Pizza

Crispy Baked Parmesan Green Bean Fries

Lots of the veggies this week would go great with this Creamy Probiotic Veggie Dip

On the farm...

Hey there members! You may have encountered some Bandwidth Error messages upon coming to our website in the previous weeks... Needless to say, your farmers built the website and blog, and are obviously not proficient in the language of html code! So, to avoid running into this problem again and again, we would like to put the call out to any of you who may be web master type folks! We need someone to look over our website to help us optimize it. We would love to trade for some farm goodies to anyone who could help us out. We are trying re-sizing the photos on the blog to see if that has an impact, but really some educated insight would help us out a lot! Please email us if you are interested!

It's Summertime again! We've been wanting to sneak away for a swim, but there's too much to get done! Our weekends are being filled with weddings of former workers, and it's been so nice to get off the farm to witness the love and bliss.

We are looking forward to the harvest party here on the farm (you can type "Turnip Rock Farm" into google maps to find us). Party is on September 14. It's a potluck. There will be music by our multi-talented crew. We really hope that you can make it out. Let us know if you have any questions.

Special thanks to our volunteers this week! Sam, Kelly, and Donny friends of Sam, Miranda, and Ben showed up and really made harvest and packing go a lot faster! Greatly appreciated in the heat!!

dragon tongue beans, back by popular demand!

Rama taste testing carrots. They pass inspection!

Turnip Rock FarmerAugust 21, 2013Comment

Week 7; August 15, 2013

What's in the box?

Sweet corn!

red cabbage

broccoli and/or cauliflower

cucumber

hot peppers (yellow hot wax and jalapeno)

the first of the tomatoes, finally!

cilantro

sweet onions

bell peppers

zucchini and summer squash

carrots

eggplant

new potatoes

*cherry tomatoes have begun to make the rounds some shares will get them this week and more in the following weeks until frost*

(sorry no photos of the Single share this week. Everything is the same as full, in lesser quantities, but no onions or cauliflower)

Notes on the box...

This is a colorful one!

Eggplant, cukes and zukes, peppers, sweet onions, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, and sweet corn should all be stored in your fridge. The crisper is the best place with the highest humidity.

Tomatoes have begun to ripen, finally! We will be putting them in the boxes in as great a quantity as we can for as long as we can. We know they are a favorite of everyone, but it looks like this season will sadly be a short one for tomatoes. I guess we can all keep our fingers crossed for a late frost! DO NOT keep your tomatoes in the fridge! They will get mealy. Store them on your counter with the stem end down (on their shoulders). We try to pack a variety of ripeness so you have some tomato to enjoy now and some later.

The sugars in Sweet Corn begin to turn to starch as soon as the corn is picked. This means that you will have tastier corn the sooner you eat it. We prefer to eat sweet corn simply for the first couple of days after picking. Just bring some water to a boil, husk the corn and remove the silk, then drop the ears into boiling water for 3 minutes. Remove from the water and serve right away with butter and salt. If you plan on making corn fritters, corn bread, or adding the corn to soup, you can use the corn that you’ve had waiting in the fridge. Sweet corn stores best in the husk in the crisper of your fridge. We should have several more weeks of wonderful sweet corn. YAY!

The skin of new potatoes is very thin and tender as they are “uncured” They are best stored out of your fridge. We like them best very simply roasted or in a potato salad with a really light dressing.

More carrots are coming next week. The quantity this week is not what we had expected and they aren't all perfectly straight, but they are all perfectly tasty!

Eggplant keeps truckin along! We hope you are enjoying it. The Italian varieties are starting to be ready along with the Asian eggplant. Both are great roasted or sautéed. The Asian eggplant is the best for stir-fry!

Recipes...

[yumprint-recipe id='11'][yumprint-recipe id='12'][yumprint-recipe id='13'] Mexican Chopped Salad -recipe calls for romaine lettuce, but I think finely chopped cabbage would work well, too.

Garden Vegetable Potato Salad

On the farm...

What a week! We are pleased that we are experiencing the warmer end of perfect weather! We can enjoy the lovely working conditions, but we know the Summer crops are ripening and growing again. The best of both worlds. We thought for sure we would have green beans this week, but looks like we will have to wait a little longer....

Josh's cousin Daniel had to catch his flight and get back to school. He was such a great help and being one person less at this point in the season was really felt by the rest of the crew. We were packing boxes until late-thirty this evening! We will miss Daniel's humor and all that he contributed this season. Can you believe that even though he lives in California he said that the vegetables here were the best he had ever tasted?! He loaded some good Wisconsin produce into his suit case before he left. Not often that our Wisconsin vegetables get exported to California! We hope Daniel will come see us again soon! Happy Birthday Daniel!!

Don't forget that the Harvest Party will be on September 14th here at the farm! There will be music played by our wonderful farm crew! There will be cute baby cows to look at! There will be yummy food! We look forward to meeting you or seeing you again!

Turnip Rock FarmerAugust 15, 2013Comment

Week 6; August 8, 2013

What's in the box?

rainbow chard

broccoli

salad mix

tender sweet cabbage

eggplant OR cauliflower

bell peppers

sweet onions

cucumbers

cilantro

zucchini/ summer squash

fennel

broccoli

summer squash/ zucchini

tender sweet cabbage OR red cabbage

salad mix

sweet onions

bell peppers

cilantro

cucumbers

Notes on the box...

This box is calling out for a big vegetable stir-fry! Onion, broccoli, summer squash, bell pepper, cabbage, and eggplant topped with some chopped cilantro! yum!

Cabbage can be stored in your crisper or just on a shelf in your fridge (though the outer leaves may dry out some this way). It will last for at least a month, but always tastes better fresher. This variety is wonderful for fresh eating. Slaws or salads are perfect. There has also been some kimchi experiments happening around here and this cabbage has proven very nice for that as well.

Salad mix is from our friend's farm, Burning River. We are doing a crop swap this season and he's the salad mix master! Burning River uses the same chemical free, sustainable growing practices that we do, and we really admire him as a farmer. We washed this mix, but since there was a lot of rain the night before it was harvested, the leaves got splashed with dirt and sand. It still had a bit of grit when we had some with lunch, so another wash is in suggested.

Sweet Onions are a favorite summer treat for us. They are not cured, so they need to be stored in the fridge and used within a couple of weeks. They are so nice and mild and sweet! They're great for fresh eating or for carmelizing. Otto enjoyed one the way he enjoys apples. I didn't expect him to be too pleased when he grabbed one and took a big bite out of it, but he just kept right on eating it until it was gone!

The zukes and summer squash really kicked it out this week, which means the plants are likely winding down. Remember that zucchini and summer squash can be used interchangeably. So you can make summer squash bread and it will be just as lovely as your zucchini bread.

Eggplant keeps trickling in slowly. We hope we are getting to everyone with it. The long skinny ones are an Asian variety and are fantastic for stir fries. A few people got the first of the Italian globe type. We hope warm enough weather keeps up for these to keep coming on. Eggplant is a great example of a vegetable that many people think they don't like until they try it fresh. It will keep longest if you are able to keep the moisture up, so in your crisper and in a plastic bag will make it last longer.

Cilantro should be stored in an open plastic bag in your fridge and used soon. It's a wonderful herb, but not the best keeper. It's young and tender and a lot less stemmy than the stuff you get in the store. You can wash it and chop up the whole bunch without having to pull the little leaves off of the stems. There will be another round of cilantro next week (hopefully with some TOMATOES!)

Single shares... see previous post for information on fennel.

Recipes...

[yumprint-recipe id='10']Savory Zucchini Cakes

Zucchini Pancakes

On the farm...

The weather cooling off has slowed some of the summer crops, but we are pretty sure we will have tomatoes for next week. FINALLY! Some other things we are looking forward to for next week will be potatoes, carrots, green beans, and more cilantro. Oh, and maybe some sweet corn, too!

Remember to mark your calendar for the harvest party! September 14 here at the farm. We will post directions and more closer to the date. We really hope to meet you there!

Josh and the cilantro harvest

Turnip Rock FarmerAugust 8, 2013Comment