Category Archives: Farm Share

by Schnookie | August 7, 2010 · 4:04 pm

I’m Sorry, August — I Was Wrong About You

I have long subscribed to the theory that August is the crappiest month of them all. I hate summer, hate hot weather, hate the hockey off-season… and I bought into the anti-August popular sentiment from other haters. For years, when thinking of everything I loathe about summertime, I’ve attributed all of it to August. It is the month that has been synonymous for me with my dreaded day-camp misery from childhood, with the unrelenting boredom of there being no good sports on TV, with the even-worse-than-day-camp misery of swim team back when we were kids, and with — ::shudder:: — shorts weather. But lately I’ve realized something about August, something truly shocking…

It’s really not that bad.

See, August is the month when this happens:

Sure, this picture was taken in July, but it was also just the tip of the iceberg. That tomato haul is NOTHING compared to what happens in August. And furthermore, it’s not often that you see that many tomatoes in July. So there.

In August, we get garden awesomeness, and our farm share starts to pay off. It’s the time when every day after work we have to head out into the garden with big bowls to hold all the delicious tomato, sweet pepper, and basil harvests. It’s the time when we have to start allotting time at the farm to pick green beans, and when the big-money crops show up in the stand. We’re talking 15 or 20 pounds of tomatoes a week! Watermelons! Big, leafy bunches of herbs! Potatoes! Hot peppers! You know, the stuff that makes us want to subscribe to the CSA in the first place. The stuff that is so delicious and so abundant that we get to spend evenings and weekends chopping and processing and milling and blanching to freeze the bounteous bounty for the winter.

Also, August is when we take vacation. Pookie’s birthday falls on Labor Day weekend, so the week leading up to it is always “birthday blow-out vacation!!!” time for us. What’s not to love in a month that promises a birthday cake- and present-filled week?

August also brings with it the hilarious awesomeness of preseason football. Sure it’s not real football, and it carries with it a whiff of “having to do sports at day camp” hot-and-sunny misery, but it is football, which means it also carries a whiff of “watching sports on TV on a cool November day”. And the end of August features the U.S. Open, which is always our yardstick of having survived the desert of Baseball Season.

There is always one night during the U.S. Open that is chillier than anyone expects it to be, and when you watch on TV everyone looks all cold and autumnal and thrilled to be watching sports under the bright lights in decidedly NON-summery weather. We had the honor of being there that night in 2007. Neither match we saw was very memorable, but the evening was perfect.

The more I think about it, the more I’m realizing that August has a lot going for it. No, the real shitty summer month is July. That bastard has been pretending to be awesome all this time, while letting me think August was the villain. And I won’t stand up for it anymore! July is hotter than August, normally doesn’t have any vacation for me, has overpriced and over-crowded travel if I did want to go on vacation, and doesn’t have anything interesting coming out of the garden. Seriously. All the delicious early-season stuff is done growing in July, and none of the delicious hot-weather stuff is ready to be harvested. July’s got a holiday weekend, but since it’s so early in the month it might as well really belong to June. And here’s the most damning indictment of July — when August ends, it’s September and summer is over; when July ends, it’s just August.

Henceforth, I refuse to hate August! I will now steer all my summer-fueled crankiness toward the true Worst Month Of The Year That Isn’t March — July.

Also, to make August more appealing, perhaps it’s time to rename the seasons. Last year Pookie and I decided that the last two weeks of August are really not all that summery, and should be considered their own sub-season called “Back To School”. Perhaps the first two weeks of August, then, could be “Pre-Back To School”, and we can all just wash our hands of Summer on July 31?

[Posted by Schnookie]

3 Comments

Filed under Farm Share, Garden, Seasonal

by Schnookie | July 10, 2009 · 4:32 pm

Picky Eating With Pookie… And Schnookie

Okay, I have a confession to make. I have never eaten beet greens. For years I have been getting beets from the farm with big, bushy bouquets of greens still attached. For years I have been growing beets in our garden and considering them failures when they produced only tender, delicate little greens and none of the roots I was really after. Our entire compost complex is built on a foundation of beet greens. I’ve been terrible.

Now, I’ve known all along that beet greens are allegedly delicious, but for some reason I’ve just… passed them by. It’s not that I was intimidated by them, or thought they’d be nasty, or even that I was being lazy. It was more that they and I were somehow, on a basic, existential level, incompatible. They went their way and I went mine, and neither party complained about it. That is, until last weekend.

We recently started harvesting our Desiree potatoes, and I decided I really wanted to make a pasta that would involve the potatoes, the farm green beans, and a lot of the green garlic we’ve got piling up all over the place. Of course, there were no green beans in our week’s farm share, so I was left casting about for something green to add to all the starches I was planning to combine. As I stood there scrolling through my mental catalog of Edible Things In The House, a little voice in my head piped up, “Beet greens!” Sure, it was true that I had two bunches of wildly leafy beets sitting in the crisper drawer, from the woefully beanless farm share. And sure, those beet greens sure looked succulent. But… they barely seemed to me a foodstuff. What if it was disgusting?

After much hemming and hawing, I decided to just go for it. The worst thing that would happen would be that we all just picked the offending greens out of our dinners, right? Plus, there’d be enough wine on hand that we could, eventually, be drunk enough to think anything tastes good. No, the time had come to brave a new frontier of food.

To make the pasta I just cooked a box of ziti; while the water was boiling and noodles cooking, I roasted a bunch of thinly sliced potatoes in a 425-degree oven and sauteed some thinly sliced onions and a heapful of minced garlic in a fair deal of olive oil. When the potatoes had gotten mildly browned, I took them out of the oven and shoveled them into the large frying pan with the onions and garlic, and tossed it all so the oil coated the potatoes. Then I heaped the pan up with the beet greens, which had been chopped into thick ribbons. I kept turning the whole mixture with tongs until the greens were wilted, and salted and peppered to taste. Then I tossed that all with the cooked, drained ziti, and topped with a generous shaving of Parmesan cheese.

Holy jumpin’. This. Pasta. Was. So. Delicious. Sure it helps that our Desiree potatoes are, as Pookie proclaimed that evening, a privilege to eat. And also that the garlic was fresh out of the ground, so it had a nice spicy kick, but no harsh aftertaste. And also that the onions in question were our first two harvested from our own garden. But what pushed it over the top, what gave it that extra yumminess, was the beet greens. They’re mellow and rich, like chard, and toothy without being tough. They’re a gorgeous color, and the stems left little hints of beet pink on the noodles. And they come attached to the beets we get from the farm! They’re, like, free! A whole new world has opened up for me. In fact, I liked beet greens so much that I made this exact same dish again just a few days later.

[Posted by Schnookie]

5 Comments

Filed under 3. July, Farm Share, Garden, Picky Eating With Pookie

by Schnookie | September 26, 2008 · 7:16 pm

Preparing For The Icy Wastelands Of Winter

There are times when my enthusiasm for my farm share wanes a bit, and I let a surplus of some vegetable or another go to waste because I’m not really in the mood to deal with it before it spoils. This weekend was not one of those times. Yeah, I was a total badass about prepping mountains of vegetables (most of which I’d picked myself) for the cold winter months that are fast approaching, and frankly, I’m really proud of myself. I may have let 90% of my zucchinis this summer hit the compost pile, but not so this weekend’s overflow veggies!

I started on Saturday with a monster batch of tomato sauce. I didn’t bother taking pictures, because I’ve written about this process before, but suffice to say that I started out with heaps of tomatoes — a mix of heirlooms and slicing tomatoes from my regular share, San Marzanos and Black Plums from our garden, and Plum Dandys from my pick-your-own share — oven roasted them down along with a bunch of heads of garlic from our garden, and milled it all. That led to about 10 quarts of watery sauce. I added a handful of dried oregano (from the farm), salt and pepper, then got boiling. By the time it was done, and I’d added scads of fresh basil from our garden, we had some for dinner and then froze up the 3 quarts that were left. Yeah, it cooked down pretty far. But it was delicious, and will be a very welcome treat this winter!

Next on my docket was the overflow of hot peppers.

I had at least 75 of these bad boys, part of them from the regular farm share, most from the pick-your-own share, and a couple from our own habanero plants in the garden. My plan was to quickly mince them all during halftime of the early football game on Sunday and then freeze them for the chili I’ll be making in the coming months.

I outfitted myself appropriately — no matter how mild the peppers might seem (and since I know at least two were Scotch Bonnets and there were the two aforementioned habaneros, I decided not to assume any of them were mild), rubber gloves are essential. I have had too many incidents where, hours after handling a pepper with my bare hands, I’ve gone to rub that itch in my eye and then “AIEEEEEEE!!!! IT BURNS!!!! IT BURNS!!!!!!!!”

Then I got chopping.

I felt like I’d barely made a dent when I heard from the living room that my plans of being done before the second half started were totally misguided.

My efforts at de-seeding the peppers, to minimize any inadvertent inclusion of rocket, rocket hotness, fell by the wayside.

The third quarter came and went, and I was still chopping. The fourth quarter came and mostly went, and I was still chopping. Yeah, an hour and a half after I started, I finally had this:

Over a pound of minced hot peppers. And then this week I brought home 40 more from the farm. If I have to chop a single pepper this winter, I’m going to be some kind of pissed.

Anyway, I might have been getting tired of missing the football while puttering in the kitchen, but I wasn’t done. No sirree, there were still the six quarts of green beans that needed to be blanched, trimmed, and bagged up.

That went surprisingly quickly, and once everything was trimmed, it was much more compact, too.

Considering how often I eat green beans, I’ve likely just put off the composting of these guys for a few months, but in the meantime, I’m feeling very good about my efforts to make my winter a tastier, veggier place.

2 Comments

Filed under 5. September, Bonanza!, Farm Share, Frozen!

by Schnookie | September 22, 2008 · 8:22 pm

A Cooking Update

I have had a tremendously lazy blogging week, probably because I’ve had a very feisty cooking one. I made a few new recipes this week, shook up our “in a rut” eating patterns, and then sat down with my laptop and thought, “I don’t have the energy at all to write about this”. But for posterity’s sake, I need to put to pen to paper (blog-style) about the corn recipes I made this week, so next September I’m not sitting around thinking, “Wait, weren’t there some corn things I used to make that were totally awesome? What were those, again?”

Anyway, the first notable thing I made this week was a tasty treat for Boomer, who got back on Sunday afternoon from visiting KtG in The Hague. I had a flashback before she left to a dessert we used to love when we were living in AZ while Pookie was still at NYU. It’s a bread-and-butter pudding that Pookie hated, and it’s a billion times more delicious than the effort you have to put into making it would suggest.

I remembered the recipe was from Gourmet, and I knew it was in my little binder of clipped-out recipes (which I update oh… every five years or so, so it’s hardly a reliable source), but I was being lazy and figured I’d find it on Epicurious. When I searched “bread and butter pudding”, I found a whole bunch of things with reviews that said stuff like, “This is heinous!” and “I would rather STARVE than eat that again” (I might be exaggerating), and I was getting depressed that I was making it up that the recipe I remembered was tasty, but then, at the end of the search, there it was. With reader reviews raving about its awesomeness. Woo hoo! All I can say about this recipe is that I don’t really love bread pudding, but I adore this. It’s every bit as good as I remembered, and even simpler to make. And it was a great “Welcome Home!” treat for Boomer.

The theme of the rest of the week, then, was corn. Pookie emailed me the link to this post on Kitchen Confit with a corn chowder recipe, and insisted that I make it, even though she doesn’t like corn chowder. Well, I happen to enjoy corn chowder quite a bit, so who was I to say no? I picked up a half dozen ears of the end-of-summer corn at the farm stand (normally I’m done buying it by now, because it’s nowhere near as sweet as it was at this time last month), parceled out a couple pounds of potatoes from my farm share, and whipped up a huge-assed pot of this soup.

I cannot stress enough how delicious this recipe is. And on a chilly night in September, with Fall really and truly here, it was just perfect. What’s better than a cozy, creamy, lightly spiced bowl of soup on an autumn night? Nothing, that’s what! I checked at the farm stand, and they said they’d have corn for another couple of weeks. That means we’re eating this at least six more times before the fresh corn is gone for the winter. And then we’ll start eating this made with the corn I froze last month.

The chowder really energized me to enjoy the waning moments of corn availability, and prompted by an assignment from Pookie from her work, I started searching for more corn recipes. What I found amazed me: How have I never made corn and potato cakes before? I love corn! I love potatoes! I love cake!

I used red pepper instead of green, and the end result was this insanely sweet, delicious, pan-fried heap of scrumptiousness. I’m sure if I was using actual starchy potatoes (like the recipe calls for) instead of the waxy ones from the farm, they would have held together better, but really, who cares? The really shocking thing about this meal, though, was that I made it on a Friday. Yeah, you heard me — on a Friday. It’s probably been ten years since I’ve cooked anything on a Friday, our traditional DiGiorno night. But this week I turned things on their ear, and we had the DiGiorno on Wednesday, to go with ANTM and Project Runway, and I made a full, wonderful meal on Friday instead. A meal of drunken beans made with Rancho Gordo marrow beans, and these corn cakes, and some Oktoberfest beer from Triumph. It’s safe to say this was the best dinner I’ve had on a Friday night in probably a decade.

3 Comments

Filed under 5. September, Fancy Dessert, Farm Share, Hearty Meals

by Schnookie | September 8, 2008 · 8:11 pm

Faux-caccia, Or: I Might Be A Crazy, Crazy Bitch, But At Least I’m Not Sandra Lee

Okay, the other night I got all creative with my farm share and winged-it with my first-ever attempt at stuffed peppers.

I had four beautiful, perfectly-shaped, giant green peppers and a fridge full of chili leftovers, so there was nothing else to be done with them. When I couldn’t find a recipe that sounded like what I wanted, I decided to just throw together something pretty obvious myself, and it turned out deliciously. I browned up some diced bacon, then sauteed some of our own newburgh onions with them, then tossed that all into some cooked couscous. Then I stirred in some dried oregano, crumbled feta, and a diced tomato from the farm. (I ended up making at least twice as much of the filling as I needed, because I had no idea how much would be enough. Good thing it’s bacon-onion-feta-tomato cousous, and is therefore utterly delicious with or without pepper surrounds.) In the meantime, I halved the peppers the long way, scooped out the seeds and ribs, blanched them in boiling water for a few minutes, then let them dry, hollow-side down, on towels. Then I scooped in the filling, covered, and baked at 325 degrees (F) for about 20 minutes, until everything was warm.

They were completely scrumptious, but I felt like they were going to need something on the side to zazz up the meal a bit. What I really wanted to do was make focaccia; I’ve been building up a head of steam lately to get back to more regular bread baking, like I used to before we moved to Maple Hoo, and focaccia seemed like a perfect way to start. I was going to top the focaccia with thinly sliced tomato from the farm (yeah, using up just one seemed to me to be “a great use for all these tomatoes!”), and I’d look all ambitious and awesome. Then I read a few focaccia recipes, realized it is a really involved process, and recognized why I don’t make stuff like that during the work week. I opted instead to make a much simpler pizza dough and just pretend it’s focaccia. Or faux-caccia. HAHAHA! Sigh.

I was surprised at how tasty the faux-caccia turned out, actually. I doused the dough in olive oil, then trampled the oil down into the dough with my fingers, just like “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” cookbook says to do with real focaccia, and then layered paper-thin slices of a mild yellow-red heirloom tomato on top (no, I have not figured out which tomatoes are which in the six seasons I’ve had a farm membership). It came out crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, and all rich and sweet from the tomato and oil. But even though it was delicious, it still struck me as a kind of lame cop-out.

That is, until I watched the episode of “Semi-Homemade Cooking With Sandra Lee” that our tivo picked up this week. The episode promised at the outset a recipe for Artichoke Focaccini, and showed us this glamour shot of them:

Considering my long history as a scholar of all things Sandra Lee, I should have seen it coming. But still, it came at me as if from out of nowhere. Yeah, she made the focaccini out of Pillsbury Grands.

I’m humbled.

16 Comments

Filed under 5. September, Baked Goods, Farm Share, Hearty Meals, Slumming It, Winging It

by Schnookie | August 19, 2008 · 6:04 pm

Winging It, CSA-Style

Okay, so having a share in a CSA is a wonderful thing, but sometimes you find yourself in a bit of a jam, where you have too many vegetables that need immediate attention.

Yesterday was one of those nights for me. I had two cubanelle peppers from last week that I wanted to prepare in a pasta sauce with the ripe Nardello pepper from our garden, and I had visions of it being a pepper-centric treatment. But when I got to the farm and started bagging up my pound of rainbow chard for this week, I remembered that I still had a pound from last week. And finally — FINALLY — there were heirloom tomatoes for us woebegone Monday pick-up drones (I do my PYO-ing on Thursdays and I know that they’ve had heirlooms for the previous two weeks, but I’m trying to be a grown-up and not complain too much about this), so of course some of my five pounds of heirloom tomatoes needed to be eaten right then. I decided to test this theory that things that grow at the same time taste good together, and figured I’d put everything I needed to cook that night into this dish.

There are several things that need to be noted at the outset here, certain mitigating factors to the final appearance of this meal. The first is that I’m a total lazy-ass in general, and I’m even moreso on Monday nights. The second is that we had blackberry syrup that needed to be consumed and a bottle of prosecco to mix with it; in other words, I was drinking. So with that in mind, I decided ahead of time to call this meal “CSA Rustica”, and give everything a coarse and, more importantly, uneven chop. It made it feel less like work that way.

So I started with about a half a pound of sweet Italian sausage, browned that up in olive oil, then tossed in the chopped peppers and garlic. I then realized that my pan was freakily dry, and two of my “these are just on the brink of becoming totally disgusting” slicing tomatoes were a bit mealy. So I chucked the diced tomatoes into the pan essentially just to deglaze it, then piled the chopped chard on top.

Only one of the heirloom tomatoes was at critical mass, and it was one of those wonderful, mild, perfect solid yellow ones. It barely needed to be seeded, because it was so fleshy. The flavor and texture on these are so marvelous and delicate that I hate to cook them, so I just diced the tomato up and figured I’d toss it with the pasta and sauce once everything was cooked. While I chopped, the chard cooked down, and my sauce started to look kind of edible, in a rustic kind of way. So I added some roughly chiffonaded basil, and gave it all a stir.

By this point I was pretty well toasted, so I “assembled” this in layers, eagerly taking pictures all along the way. Me + alcohol + camera = Pookie saying, “Why are there 500 shots of that pan of sausage in the camera?”

The bowl started with those little medium-sized shells, then the sauce was poured over (and lots of blurry pictures taken), then everything was topped with the yellow heirloom.

Then the whole thing got a generous grating of Parmesan cheese, and I tossed it all together.

So how did it turn out? Well, either I was really drunk by the time I got around to eating it, or there’s something to this “things that are in season together are delicious together” thing. Because it was awesome. I arrived home from the farm thinking too many veggies are my cross to bear, and finished up dinner thinking about how lucky I am to have such an embarrassment of freshness at my disposal.

17 Comments

Filed under 4. August, 8. August, Farm Share, Garden, Harvested, Hearty Meals, We Grew This, Winging It

by Schnookie | August 15, 2008 · 3:37 pm

Baked Pinquito Beans — A Revelation

A couple of years ago Boomer and I took a two-day “BBQ Boot Camp” course at the Culinary Institute of America. One of the things we made during production there was baked beans, and it was really the first time I ever dealt with dried beans; they’d always seemed so daunting to me, but I discovered then exactly how easy it is to soak and then cook non-canned beans. Sure, it takes a lot of advance planning, but it’s hardly rocket surgery. The recipe we were assigned was Boston baked beans, and was apparently lifted from the back of a bag of beans from a national brand — our chef instructor chuckled about that when we all raved about what a delicious, delicious recipe it was. As soon as the course was done, Boomer and I went on a feverish hunt to find our own bean crock, so we could make these bad boys all the time. We found the crock while on vacation in Scottsdale (of course. I mean, where else would a gal get a pot for baked beans?) and then I got into the habit of baking up a batch every six months or so.

Now, the baked beans were good and all, but there was always something just a little bit disappointing about them. They would spend a few hours in the oven making the whole house smell dizzyingly delicious, but then when I tried them, they’d be just slightly lacking. I’m not sure what the deal was, but I always thought they tasted a little tinny or something. They ended up just short of delicious, which was odd, because the ones at the CIA were so good. I always used just whatever navy beans were on hand in bags on the shelves of my bobo grocery store, and didn’t think twice about it. That is, I didn’t think twice about it until now.

You see, this summer we made an amazing internet discovery: Rancho Gordo. I cannot stress enough how much I am in love with them. Every time we eat a new dish made with Rancho Gordo beans, we start gushing about how, of all the wonderful things we’ve eaten or done this summer, Rancho Gordo is our big winner. And when I looked at the bag of Santa Maria Pinquito beans that I’d bought from them, I decided to try them in my baked bean recipe.

I started out by not soaking the beans. I know, I know… But Rancho Gordo’s site says that their beans are fresher than grocery store beans, so they don’t take as long to cook. The pinquitos are so wee, too, that I figured they’d be fine just going into the pot dry. The deal with the recipe itself, then, is as follows (I halved it for this batch):

1 lb. of dried pea or navy beans (soaked overnight in 1 quart of water, then drained)
1 cup of diced onion
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tbsp dry mustard
1/3 cup molasses
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 bay leaf
1 cup diced tomato
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cracked black pepper
2 cups water
3 oz slab salt pork (or 4 slices of bacon)
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup ketchup

Add the onion and garlic to the bottom of a ceramic bean pot or oven-proof pot with a tight-fitting cover. Top with the beans.

In a small saucepan combine the mustard, molasses, brown sugar, bay leaf, tomatoes, salt, pepper and water. Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer lightly for 2 minutes. Pour the boiling mixture over the beans.

Score the salt pork deeply from the fat side nearly all the way through, and place skin side up on top of the beans. Or top with the bacon slices.

Cover the pot and bake in a 300-degree (F) oven for 4 hours, or until the beans are tender. While baking, periodically check the beans and add boiling water if needed to keep the beans covered with liquid. When the beans are tender, remove from the oven and stir in vinegar and ketchup.

For this batch, I used our own Newburgh onions from the garden, garlic from the farm, and ramapo tomatoes from the farm. And instead of salt pork, I used slab bacon. I’ve made these both ways (with the salt pork and with bacon), and I prefer the bacon because when the beans are cooked, I like to dice up the bacon slices really finely and stir them in with the beans.

Now, based on past experience with navy beans, and based on using unsoaked pinquitos, I was fully prepared for this pot to take MONTHS to cook. I hovered at the side of the oven, regularly adding liquid, calculating that I shouldn’t even bother testing the beans until they’d been baking for at least five hours.

So color me shocked when the experts at Rancho Gordo turned out to be right — these puppies cook up in no time flat. After just three hours in the oven, my baked beans were perfectly tender and a bit soupy, thanks to my overzealousness adding water to the pot.

But even with just a bit too much liquid in the mix, these beans managed to erase, in one fell swoop, all of my doubts about this recipe or my ability to prepare it. They were delicious. The beans themselves are, unlike the grocery-store navy beans, actually flavorful. They are rich and meaty and a little bit sweet, and the perfect size and texture for a barbecue bean. In this recipe, they work so well with all the sweet flavors. As they baked up, they made the house smell intoxicating, and somehow still managed to be even more delicious than I expected.