Week 4
Hi everyone,
Happy Summer! We've passed the solstice, and now it's official. I hope you all have some fun plans to get out and enjoy it. CNY has some rough winters, but we also have beautiful summers. We had quite the rainstorm at the farm, but luckily without too much erosion damage. Sue and Claude use a network of cover crop strips to hold the soil and keep their hillside intact. There are very few flat areas on the farm, so erosion control is very important. And the peas and beans and summer squash plants soaked up the water and are growing rapidly!
In your bags this week, there is a nice assortment of veggies:
Spinach
Salad Mix
Baby Carrots
Radishes (small but quite spicy - they pack a punch!)
Garlic Scapes (garlic flower stalks cut before they bloom - chopped up they sauté much like garlic cloves)
Pea Shoots
So the first things that comes to mind is a stir fry. The radishes sliced up really thinly, the garlic scapes chopped up in little bits and the pea shoots chopped in half and added at the last second- sounds tasty to me! The pea shoots will need only a tiny bit of cooking. They are very tender and also would make a nice salad topping just raw. The flowers are pretty and edible, too. If you'd like to try something else, here's a blog with a recipe: Cooking with Alison.
The baby carrots are candy-sweet and if you can use them for anything before they just get eaten out of the bag, I'm all ears!
Last night my husband made us a quick dinner by sautéing some garlic and onions in a little olive oil until they were soft and translucent, then he added the spinach and let it wilt down with a little salt and pepper on top. Then he added some whisked eggs to scramble in the same pan, then topped it all off with a little goat cheese we had on hand (we joined a cheese CSA ourselves this summer!) and let it melt as the eggs cooked. This might be my new favorite quick summer dinner. Very satisfying, and really delicious with the greens and cheese. Give it a try! Other cheeses would work well, too, I'm sure. More and more I'm getting away from using recipes and just trying to make food. The simpler, the better. Of course, I still have my go-to recipe books (Moosewood collection, Joy of Cooking) and I'll use the internet to research some methods and get some inspiration. If you have any recipes that work well, please let me know- I'd love to share them with the other people in the CSA. You can post them as a comment to this blog or send them to me via email: sarahcvannorstrand@gmail.com
Have a great week and happy cooking!
Sarah VanNorstrand
for Lucky Moon Farm