In Your Share This Week
- Beets, Golden
- Cabbage, Red
- Chicory, Pan di Zucchero
- Field Greens (farmer’s choice of rainbow mixed cooking greens…so good!!!)
- Kohlrabi
- Onions, Red Storage
- Winter Squash, Butternut
Its a festive, fun full-spectrum share this week! It seems like the 2015 CSA season flew by so fast for us on the farm, we hope you’ve all enjoyed the variety of produce in your shares throughout the seasons.
If you want to keep the SIO goodness going, you can do it several ways:
- Join our Winter CSA for bi-weekly deliveries of storage crops and winter greens.
- Stock up via our bulk ordering and have lots of Organic local produce on-hand all winter long.
- Come see us at winter Farmers Market…details TBA but we have some exciting plans up our sleeves!
Crop Notes
Beets, golden: Probably my favorite beet…both because of its lovely color and great flavor. If you like juicing, Gold Beets are also great along with carrots, apple, ginger, or turmeric- they add a boost of nutrients without the overpowering flavor of red beet juice.
Field Greens: We are really excited to include this specialty item in the share- its a rather large staple on the farm throughout the late winter months. ‘Field Greens’ are a product we created that is essentially a farmer’s choice mix of nearly all of the various greens that we grow. It has a festive visual appeal and tastes great chopped and used raw, or cooked. It’s a great test of your plant identification skills…look for pac choi, napa cabbage, chard, escarole, a rainbow of both mild and spicy mustards, and 3-4 types of kales! Because the leaves are somewhat large, the Field Green mix doesn’t do well in our washing equipment (the stems poke holes in other leaves, ribs crack, bruising happens…trust us, its not great)- so we don’t wash the Field Mix at all. When you’re ready to use your greens, fill your sink partway with water or get a large tub or bowl to submerge the leaves in, then pull the leaves out and place in a colander and then shake gently or roll in a towel to remove the excess water. Dont store the greens super wet because they have a tendency to get slimy if you do that. Enjoy!
Kohlrabi: It’s the last kohlrabi installment of the 2015 season…and we’ve got both Kossak (the very large green kohlrabi that you’ve seen in the shares before) and also the aptly named ‘Gigante’. These both will store very well in your refrigerator (we’ve successfully kept some until Feb/March in storage trials on the farm), just wrap it in a plastic bag to help it retain its moisture and juicy crunch. You can also cut it in half or quarters as needed for cooking and put the rest into the bag in the fridge for next time.
Winter Squash, Butternut: I know this time of year, the good ol’ refrigerator veggie drawers can get kinda full with the plethora of root veggies. I was taught a nifty trick about what to do with the rest of the squash if you don’t need or want to use the entire butternut all at once- cut off a part of the neck for cooking with, and after a few minutes you’ll notice some clear liquid ‘sap’ coming out of the pores where you made the cut. Just wipe this around the entire surface of the cut, and leave it out! Yup, that’s right…leave it out! Essentially what happens is the squash ‘scabs’ over the cut surface and prevents bacteria, fungus, or other microbes that incite decay from getting into the body of the fruit. Pretty cool!