WEEK OF AUGUST 15

The past couple of weeks have been busy with the dog days of summer.  Time flew past and I had forgotten to update the blog.  Between these busy days I have been feeling parched and anxious for some much needed rain.  Some days no matter how much we water it seems like the only thing to help these veggies is true water falling from the clouds.  During this time of the season we should remember to be thankful for the beautiful bounty the garden has grown and if it means spending more of your time trying to put as many good vegetables to use before they go bad just think of the cooler season about to knock on our door.  The gardens are growing with squash and soon to be cucumber mania.  Our winter squash are blooming and have beautiful little babies on the vines.  Below are recipes and a few interesting notes from some foodies.

Excerpt from the founder of Johnny’s Seed, Rob Johnston, Spring 2008 “The increase in home vegetable gardening is being well publicized this spring, and normally the reason given is economic, like high gasoline prices and sticker shock at the supermarket. I think that these economics are a factor, but not the main factor. Home vegetable gardening was in decline or was static in the US, and I think in the whole "first world," throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and 2000s up through 2006. During those 25 years there were several bad periods economically, but there was no vegetable gardening increase in response to any of them. I think that the main motivation is quality of life, and a regaining of meaningful culture.”

 

Why Bother?

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

 Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

 

Below are two recipes to put to good use during this time when you might find yourself wondering how to use a head of broccoli in one meal?

Broccoli Pesto

1 head broccoli

¼ cup toasted pumpkin seeds

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup Parmesan cheese

Chop and blanch the head of broccoli.  Puree pumpkin seeds in a food processor then add cooked broccoli, Parmesan, and olive oil.  Puree and taste for salt and pepper.  Try it on pizza, pasta, toast, or with freshly cut tomatoes.

 

Zucchini Sauce

3-4 medium squash or zucchini

¼ stick of butter

3 cloves of garlic

¼ cup chopped onion

Melt butter over low heat in pan.  Roughly chop squash and add to butter with garlic and onion.  Place a lid on top and cook for 45 minutes stirring.  Place everything from pan in a food processor and puree.  Add salt and pepper and some fresh basil and a dash of lemon juice.  Try it on lots and be creative.

WEEK OF JULY 18^TH

The tomatoes are starting to turn.  We picked the first one for dinner on Friday.  Our squash and cucumbers are in bloom.  Fennel, cabbage, and broccoli are starting to mature.  The beans and potatoes will be around for several weeks to come. We finished harvesting all the garlic this past week.  We will let it dry and divide up the best looking bulbs to plant this coming fall for next years harvest.  For now your share will have garlic each week until our supply gets low.  During this time of year I try to cook with produce from the garden every day of the week.  I am always looking at recipes for inspiration on different ways of preparing the summer bounty.  Below are some ideas for this week’s bounty.

Whole Roasted Garlic:  Break the cloves of garlic apart and remove the out layer of skin.  Place the cloves on a piece of foil and drizzle with olive oil.  Fold the foil around the cloves and place in the oven/toaster oven.  Bake at 350 for thirty minutes or until golden brown.  Roasting fresh garlic is great and you can put it in anything like pasta, pizza, or spread it on some crusty French bread with butter. 

Vegetable Ragout with a Basil Cream Sauce:

Cube 1 pound of potatoes and lightly fry in two tablespoons of oil.  While the potatoes cook, cut off the tops of the green beans and then cut them in half on the diagonal.  Once the potatoes have browned add ½  cup water with a teaspoon of veg or chicken stock concentrate.  Cook on low until liquid reduced by half.  Take off heat and add ¼  cup cream.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Add the green beans and stir.  For the basil cream sauce put ½  cup sour cream and ½  cup fresh basil leaves, and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice in the Cuisinart and puree.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Drizzle the sauce over the ragout.  This makes a great side dish or mix with cooked pasta and some Italian sausage.  

CSA Week of July 11

Every 36 hours is the exact amount of time between bean harvests and as soon as you think you picked all of them you will find another hanging from the bush.  This week has been great with plenty of sunshine, cool temps for July, and rain!  We are starting to plant fall crops.  I started with radicchio and next will be broccoli raab and maybe the fall spinach will produce better than the spring spinach.  I have spoken to several people who have also had a hard time with spring spinach.  In farming there are always surprises and struggles.  I get the NYT every Wednesday to read the food section.  The paper usually hangs around until I have read each article.  The recipes are always in tune with the season.  Below is an article from the NYT and we thought you might be interested in reading it.  Check out the recipe for the beans, this particular variety is called Haricot Vert. 

Mediterranean Veggie Salad

Borrowed from “Farmer John’s Cookbook” By: John Peterson

½ pound green beans cut in half on the diagonal

6 ounces marinated artichokes, drained and quartered

2 hard-boiled eggs chopped

½ red onion

¼ cup sliced black olives

1 minced garlic clove

2 Tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

1 Tablespoon chopped fresh basil

1/3 cup olive oil

¼ cup red wine vinegar

2 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Blanch the beans for 5 seconds in boiling water then run under cold water to stop the cooking.  In a medium size bowl whisk the herbs, garlic, vinegar, oil, and mustard until well blended.  Toss all remaining items in bowl with dressing, salt and pepper to taste.  Toss this on a bed of greens, or make a pasta salad, or a potato salad or just leave it alone. 

New York Times June 6, 2008,  9:27 am

Boosting Health With Local Food

The local food movement typically has been about improving the health of the planet. Buying locally means less fuel burned to transport food, which means less pollution.

But now researchers are trying to find out if eating locally farmed food is also better for your health.

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant to study the public health impact of moving toward a local, sustainable food system. An increasingly vocal local food movement calls for consumers to try to buy and eat foods produced within 100 miles of their homes.

So far, there’s not real evidence that eating locally farmed food is better for you. But there are many reasons to think it might be. By definition, locally farmed food is not going to come from large commercial food companies, so people who eat locally aren’t going to consume as much processed food, which typically contains lots of refined carbohydrates, sugar, fat and preservatives.

By focusing your diet on products grown and raised within 100 miles of your home, you will likely end up eating more fruits and vegetables as well. Shopping for fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets is also pleasurable and may lead to more variety in your diet. Eating local often means you can meet the people who produce your food, and you can also ask questions about pesticide use and farming methods.

The University of North Carolina study will last two years, and researchers say it will improve understanding of the health, environmental and economic issues associated with the local food trend. The study will look at the environmental benefits of transitioning to sustainable farming practices, determine whether there are nutritional and health benefits for consumers, and conduct an economic analysis of opportunities and barriers to local food systems.

“Among the most pressing public health problems in the U.S. today are obesity, environmental degradation and health disparities,” said Alice Ammerman, director of the U.N.C. Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. “Contributing in a big way to each of these problems is our current food system, with its heavy dependence on fossil fuels such as fertilizers, pesticides and gasoline for large-scale production and long distance transportation of often high-calorie, nutrient-poor food, from farm to processing facility to table.”

To read more about local food, read this post from last year called “A New Yorker Tries the 100-mile Diet.'’

And check out this recent article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/us/10farms.html?ex=1373515200&en=11b009fd22bc116c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

This past week we cleaned up the brassica (cabbage family) and fennel bed, as they were both full of weeds from the recent rain.  We also harvested the last few remaining handfuls of peas.  Our pea bed was severely damaged from hail a few weeks back.  We were not able to harvest as much as we had anticipated.  So we mowed down the legumes and will plant a summer cover crop in its place.  We started our potato harvest and hope it will last for the next month.   Our French green beans are flowering and we picked a few handfuls for dinner last night.  The saying is once they start we will need to harvest every 36 hours.  So the beans should be plentiful this coming week.  Our tomatoes are growing taller by the day with lots of green ones.  Squash and cucumbers are slowly making flowers and we may have fruit in a few weeks.  Enjoy the recipes and have a great week.  

One of our favorite recipes borrowed from “Vegetable Harvest” by Patricia Wells:

Lemon-Roasted Potatoes with Bay Leaves

2 pounds new potatoes

2 bay leaves

1 lemon, scrubbed and cut lengthwise in 8 slices

2 tablespoons best-quality walnut oil or extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1)    Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2)    Scrub the potatoes, but do not peel.  Halve them lengthwise.  In a large bowl, combine the potatoes, bay leaves, lemons, lemon juice, oil, and salt.  Toss to evenly coat the potatoes.  Transfer to a roasting pan large enough to hold them in a single layer.  Roast until the potatoes are soft and golden, turning the potatoes regularly, about 40 minutes.  Remove from the oven and remove and discard the by leaves.  Season generously with oregano, rubbing the herb with your palms to intensify the oregano flavor.

Spring Greens Pilaf with Oranges and Olives borrowed from “Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini” by Elizabeth Schneider

½ pound mustard greens, kale, or chard

1.5 tablespoon olive oil

1 minced garlic clove

½ teaspoon cumin seeds

1 cup long-grain white rice

1 cup orange juice

½ teaspoon orange zest

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon honey

¾ cup water

3 tablespoon sliced green olives

1 orange sectioned and diced

3 tablespoon roasted and chopped cashews or almonds

 

Cook greens until just softened.  Heat oil in medium saucepan over moderate heat.  Add garlic and cumin.  Add rice and stir often until golden about 6 minutes.  Combine orange and lemon juice, zest, salt to taste, and honey in a bowl, stir to blend.  Add juice mixture to rice with greens, water, and olives.  Bring to a boil, stirring.  Reduce heat to lowest point, cover and cook 20 minutes.  Without uncovering, remove from heat and let stand 15 minutes.  Fluff rice in to dish, incorporating orange dice and nuts.