CSA Wednesday, Week 5

Things are really starting to produce at the farm, and it feels like I'm bringing home more and more each week. I think I may need to freeze some things this weekend.

I could smell the basil as soon as I walked up to the farm stand, and my mouth started watering. I don't know what it is about me and basil. And onions! Happy about having more of them too. I can't seem to get enough of the two these days...

This week's share includes...
1 bunch broccoli
1 head red leafed lettuce
1 bunch greens (I took the chard, I did!)
2 lbs summer squash (the yellow squash with green ends are "Zephyr," the pale green squash is "Magda")
1.5 lbs mixed onions; Yellow Walla Walla, Super Sweet Stockton Reds, and Torpedo
2 zucchini or Gypsy peppers (heck yeah, I took the first peppers of the season!)
1 bunch basil
1.25 lbs plouts
1.25 lbs white peaches (nom!)
1 loaf Double Olive Bread

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the head of lettuce is huge (at least to me), and I had to weigh it. It came in at 12 ounces...

One of Boy Wonder's friends came over yesterday, and the first thing out of my mouth to the dad was, " Hi. Do you like plums?" He started to explain that he liked them but the rest of the--I cut him off, dragged him inside, and gave him a quart sized bag of 'em. LOL. I would've given him more, but didn't want to look overly desperate about trying to offload them. So, with about 8 lbs of plums in the fridge, more on the tree, and those silly loquats, I'm less than enthused to see the plouts in this week's share.

Challenges: The one challenge this week is to avoid spoilage. LOL I don't know where the time has gone, or why I have so much left from last week, but I have a fridge full of produce right now.

Speaking of last week...
My second go at making zucchini bread went a lot better. I shredded the zucchini, and put in cheese cloth and squeezed out a lot of the moisture...

I used the rest of the zucchini in in a farro Side dish, which I showed you on Monday. You can find the recipe on my cooking blog, here.

I used the kale in this recipe intended for Chard, and served with cheese tortellini to make a vegetarian meal. I loved the combination of Kalamata olives and caramelized onions, but didn't care for the capers. DH loved the capers, and didn't like the olives. LOL

I purchased some endive and raddichio to make the lettuce from last week's share go further, and combined three recipes to make one awesome salad. I had this Mixed Green, Pecan Chicken, and Goat Cheese Salad (with and without the chicken) three times last week, and for dinner tonight. My Mom-in-Law is here, so I'll have to share the recipe with you when I have a moment.

Come on Already!

I'm starting to see red about not seeing red...

I wonder how many more tomatoes my Viva Italia can squeeze out without having any of them turn red. Is this because it's a determinate tomato?

The second largest tomato is 2.5 inches long. I couldn't get into the middle of the plant to measure the larger (and first) tomato.

It's an absolute jungle in there, and all three tomato plants are fighting for space. The Viva, which is in the middle front, has managed to sprawl out and is climbing up against the window behind it. Perhaps I should've done more pruning of suckers?

The plants are about four feet tall...

The two Pearson's that were planted to the left and right behind the Viva Italia are finally starting to push out their fruits.

Finally, all three Tumbling Tom's have pea to cherry sized fruits on them. The plants themselves are looking pretty scraggly, but I'm sure it won't take long for them to fill in...

Harvest Monday

It has finally reach a level of hotness that feels like summer here... You know, the kind of days that start and end with sweat? I'm not complaining, really, I'm not. Because I was just complaining about it not being hot, and not feeling like summer. Har!

Right after breakfast yesterday morning, I pulled everyone outside to help harvest plums before the sun cooked us. I'm pretty sure our tree is a Santa Rosa variety... We're right on time with last year's harvest at the end of June.

From Gardening For You:

"The Santa Rosa plum is probably one of the most popular plums in Arizona and California. Whilst the Santa Rosa plum tree is partly  self  fertile, hardy and upright,  the plums need no pollenizer, (but the plum  crop would increase with a pollenizer close by). Santa Rosa plum trees  produce medium-large plums that have a crimson reddish skin which is slightly freckled yet the flesh of the plum is amber with a tinge of red, this  is a firm plum that is aromatic, sweet and juicy, but near the pit it is quite acid."

We should've gotten out there a few days sooner, but just didn't have the time...

Since our harvesting method from last year worked so well, we used it again. With two of us holding a bed sheet under the tree, and the third shaking the branches with our limb cutter (which DH showed me that it does extend... Grrrr--I could've reached all those cherries that needed to be harvested earlier this month!), we harvested 11.5 pounds! There are a lot more plums that are ripening, so we'll get one more round off the tree later this week.

I took the boys to a friend's house this morning to play in the pool, and traded two pounds of plums for 4 pounds of loquats. I have absolutely no idea what I'll do with them, but it was neat exchanging fruit. Did you know that loquat seeds contain cyanide?

I also harvested 4 ounces of green and yellow beans. I steamed them with CSA broccoli and sea salt, and threw them into farro with torpedo onions and zucchini (both from CSA) I had leftover from the previous night.

It's going to be pretty busy around here this coming week, so I may only post again with my CSA update. I'm off to clean for the next 48 hours, and then my mother-in-law arrives for a week-long visit. I can't wait! I get along exceptionally well with her, and haven't seen her since our visit home in October...

Each week Daphne over at Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday. Check out her page to see what other's have been munchin' and crunchin' on this week.

CSA Wednesday, Week 4

Oh, goodness, today couldn't come fast enough! I've been scrounging around for veggies in the fridge for meals for two days now, and that's after buying a bag of carrots and a couple cucumbers--but more on the cukes later.

This week's share includes...
1 (huge) head of green leaf lettuce
1 bunch broccoli
1 bunch kale or chard (I chose kale again)
1.5 pounds summer squash (I took all zucchini)
1 bunch mint or parsley (there wasn't mint when I was there)
1 head of garlic
2 baskets of strawberries
1 basket baby plums
1 brownie and 1 chocolate walnut cookie, courtesy of Feel Good Bakery

I'm going to start with my complaint to get it out of the way, and then onto the good stuff... One cookie and one brownie? What am I supposed to do with these? We're touchy about our chocolate here (sweets in general, really, since I don't make/buy them too often anymore), so how are we supposed to split this between three and a half people? I wonder how the mother of three boys who came in as I was leaving dealt with the chocolate rations... I don't like walnuts either, so there should be an interesting discussion happening at the dinner table tonight...

Alright. Got that off my chest... I'm happy to see more lettuce on the "menu," and have a yummy salad dressing from the How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book involving my new food fascination, caramelized onions. I wanted to try it last week but couldn't since we didn't get lettuce. I can't wait to make it. I'm also really happy to have broccoli for the first time through our CSA, and in over 5 weeks! It's a staple veggie here, and it's been missed. Those heads should supply us with two dinner sides. I also found a couple recipes for kale so I picked it up instead of chard. If there's chard next week I'll get that just to say I tried it, hehe.

There were several kinds of summer squash like smooth and bumpy crooknecks, scallop, and zucchini. I went with all zucchini to try remaking zucchini bread. See, I made zucchini bread with that very large zucchini I picked out last week which, shredded, gave me 2.5 cups worth. My recipe called for 2 cups, but I thought, "What the heck," and threw it all in. Ooops! I ended up with two dense loaves of bread with squishy bottoms. The top halves tasted great LOL. So, I'm trying the recipe again because I know I can make it work!

Challenges: There are a lot of greens this week, but I think I can manage to use it all. Garlic. Boy, the garlic is starting to add up. I need to either come up with a way to use a lot of it in a recipe, or a way to preserve it. Is there such a thing as garlic pie? Pies always use a lot of filling... We're still trying to finish up the sweet & sour plums from last week, so finishing the ones we picked up this week may take some time.


Speaking of last week...
What's left:
1/2 a basket of sweet & sour plums
1 Torpedo onion
2 apriums
a little thyme

What I made:
I had a lot of fun with food last week. As I noted above, I made zucchini bread, which I've never made before. It tastes a lot like banana bread, minus the banana flavor. Boy Wonder didn't like it, but I can't blame him this time since the bread was so extremely moist--it was fully cooked, just overly moist. I also used the huge onion along with the red onion I picked up the first week to make caramelized onions. I think I mentioned it before, but I'm in love with caramelized onions. I found this great tutorial on how to make them correctly.

Here's some on a pita chip with Boxer Cheddar. Forget the pita chip! I liked it better with only the cheese!

The basil I shared with you as a part of my Harvest Monday, along with a couple apriums went into an Apricot Basil Dressing that I found here. This was... different... Not a bad dressing, but I think it needed to be paired with a more bitter green than the lettuce I served it with. Adding Boxer Cheddar to the salad helped.

I used thyme throughout the week in meals, but my favorite was this roasted chicken dish.

I also used some thyme to make my first ever batch of chicken broth. I used the carcass from the above chicken, and another two from the freezer. This was so easy to make, and I hope I never have to buy store-bought broth again.

Now for the pride of my experiments... Refrigerator pickles. I used the little pickling cucumbers, and a torpedo onion in this recipe. I also bought extra cucumbers so I could use up all of the brine (Is that what it's called? Pickle juice?). There are a million and one pickle recipes out there, but I decided to go with this one mainly because I had all the spices on hand.

These taste really really good. I've only tasted the store-bought cucumbers because the cucumbers from the CSA are really wrinkly, and I don't know if they're ok to eat like this, or if the pickles were too old by the time I got to them...

Alright. I'm off to the store to pick up a few items for this week's meals. Cheers!

Gearing Up

Most of the garden is still feeling a little hesitant about throwing caution to the wind and letting loose with producing, but the signs that they're gearing up for all out production mode abound!

My Isabella Charantais' first female! This was taken Sunday, and I spotted two more today. They've been hand pollinated to up their chances of survival.

Looks like this lil one is making a comeback.

I decided to plant the Thai Hot pepper plant behind the melon plant above, along with some basil where the garlic used to be. It took the Thai Hot no time to settle in.

One of two White Habanero's is beginning to flower. These finicky little plants just didn't like the cool start to summer... Bring on the heat (pun intended)!

All three Tumbling Tom cherry tomato plants are beginning to flower, and look like this one...

The Meyer lemons are plumping up as well as putting out new leaves and flowers. My last lemon count was 25, and now it's down to 12 that are looking more and more like green lemons each day.

Although the plants are still relatively small (maybe 8" - 12" tall), both Bush Slicer cucumbers are hard at work...

As are the Bush King acorn squash...

It won't be long before my Purple Queens are added to the Harvest Monday tally.

I replaced all of the bolted lettuces in my salad table with basil I needed to plant. This brings my basil plant total to 4 varieties, and 23 plants. LOL I see lots of pesto in my future...

Two things not shown are my determinate tomatoes and the plums. The Pearson tomatoes are taking their sweet stinkin' time with producing anything, although they're flowering like crazy at the top of the plants. The Viva Italia is doing really well and is almost overtaking the two Pearson's behind it, but this too, is taking it's sweet time in giving me a red tomato. Some of the plums should be ready to pick this weekend. I picked four of the low hanging fruits, and they're still a little yellow around the stem and quite firm.

I fertilized all of the plants in my SWP's with a half-strength water soluble fertilizer (with my history of fertilizing thus far, I'm playing it safe!). With the exception of this and watering, things are pretty self sufficient right now. This leaves me with time for planning the fall garden, yessss!

Harvest Monday

I'm running a little short on time today, and want to get these up while I can, so please forgive my lack of intro, and all that proper blogging stuff... ;-)

All but one of my potato plants have died, so I decided to clean the buckets out. These were found on Wednesday in the first round of buckets I planted back in February. Close to half a pound there...

This morning I was going to get rid of the last two buckets...

...but decided to keep the one plant still half way thriving after discovering little potatoes growing up the stem!

I didn't find any potatoes in the bucket above, but the other bucket held around a half a pound of potatoes, mostly russet mini's, bringing this week's potato harvest to 1 pound. 

I spent some time snooping around the bush beans on Wednesday, and found these.

Here are a few pictures of the beans. It seems like each time I lift the bean leaves, there's new growth to be found...

I picked these yesterday, bringing this week's bean weight in at 12 ounces.

I'm thinking I'll pan fry the beans and potatoes with a little olive oil, thyme garlic and onion for a side tonight.

I also harvested some basil. The leaves on the left are standard Italian, and on the right are Italian Cameo. I'll talk about how I used these in this week's "CSA Wednesday" post.

I don't know if this is considered a "harvest" or not, but my Whirlybird nasturtiums are going to seed, so I've been saving the pods when they readily fall off the stem...

Each week Daphne over at Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday. Check out her page to see what other's have been munchin' and crunchin' on this week.

CSA Wednesday, Week 3

Week three of our CSA has me feeling a little less excited than I was last week... I'm finding that a "bunch of this," and a "pound of that" is a bit much for us to finish in a week. On the flip side of that statement, I'm still trying to get into the new habit of incorporating more of the veggies into our meals. I'm also trying to get better at meal planning, which I haven't been able to stick to in my 3 years of off-again, on-again trying... Factor in not knowing what I'll be picking up until half way through the week, and it makes things a little more complicated...

By the bye, I found another article on Edible Communities about our farm if you'd like to learn more about it where my CSA shares are coming from.

Without  further ado, this week's share:

This week's share includes...
1.25 pounds apriums
1.25 pounds white flesh nectarines
1 basket red or yellow sweet and sour plums
1 bag loose leaf lettuce
1 bunch collards or choi (I chose choi)
1 pound summer squash (equaled one zucchini that was 1.5 pounds--variety is "Raven"*)
2 pounds Torpedo onions* (I found a large white one in the crate, so I took that with the Torpedo variety)
1 bunch (6 small to medium heads) of white garlic
1 bunch parsley or thyme (I chose thyme)
French batard loaf
Bonus Box: pickling cucumbers
*Links to varieties are not where the farm gets their seeds. I don't know where they get their seeds.

Where to start... Let's start with the fruits. I wasn't very excited about having apriums again. We still have a few left from last week because they've been hit or miss for us. Some have been too tart, and others have gone bad (even though they're stored in the fridge). They're also, well, "BM inducing" like the plouts/plums, and the LO is sensitive to "inducing" foods, so I'm supplementing his fruit intake with store-bought grapes and some watermelon (left over from Boy Wonder's school party). I was really hoping I'd be able to pick the stone fruit types again this week... Oh well... The white nectarines rock, so I'm happy to have more. I've never heard of "sweet and sour" plums before. They're the fruits that look like cherries in the picture. They sort of taste like a mix between plums and under ripe cherries.

There were "extras" in the bonus box today. Most were bruised fruit, but then there was an overflowing bag of the pickling cucumbers. I grabbed a handful to try making refrigerator pickles. Oh, my mouth is watering...

The big challenge for me this week will be using up the fruit. I think I'll make a dessert with the apriums. I'm happy to report that the choi will not be a problem to consume. I chose the choi over the collards (ok DH came with us today and he chose it) because it was a success last week.


Speaking of last week...
What's left:
Choi - about half the amount I brought home, but plan on using tomorrow.
1 large onion scape
1 plout
2 apriums
garlic (I added to the garlic I grew, and what I received this week)
a little chives

What I made:
The strawberries and bread were gone the first day, and the white nectarines disappeared shortly thereafter.
I've been pleasantly surprised with my chive usage. I thought the herb would go bad from not being used, but I only have a little left. I've been using scissors to snip, adding it to as many dishes as I can think of. It's been more of a color adder than flavor enhancer.

"Mrs. Farm Owner" recommended the following recipe for using the onion scapes.

Scape Pesto with Artichokes
I added some chopped asparagus that almost got lost in the fridge's veggie bin, and used jarred marinated artichoke hearts. I didn't use all of the onion scape pesto out of fear of the onion overpowering everything, but I should've added more. The pesto didn't have as much flavor as I thought it would... I froze the remaining pesto, and still have one huge scape sitting in a cup of water that I need to use.

A huge "THANK YOU" goes out to Clare from Curbstone Valley Farm for the following Choi recipe.
DH and I are obviously going to eat the food I make, our 2yo still doesn't "know better" and has more of a... refined pallet than our 8yo, so our picky 8yo is the one we use to gauge whether a recipe is a hit or not. Let me just say the following recipe was devoured by him, and was one of the quickest meals we've had since I made fried chicken in February (fried chicken is a big deal here)!

Can you tell I'm left-handed?

I'll call this "Clare's Tofu Stir Fry"
1 package extra firm tofu, drained and cubed into 1/2" pieces
2 Tbs oil (I used part canola, part sesame)
2-4 cloves, finely chopped
1-2 Tbs freshly grated ginger
1/2 cup teriyaki sauce
1 bunch chopped pak choi
1 chopped bell pepper**
Prepared rice

Fry the tofu in the oil until edges are nice and crispy. Remove the tofu, and add garlic and ginger, and cook until aromatic and lightly golden. Toss the tofu back in the pan, add teriyaki sauce and cook for 1-2 minutes until the sauce starts to thicken. Add the chopped greens and cover just long enough to wilt the greens, about 2-3 minutes. Remove the lid and stir together. Serve over rice.

**I added the pepper to help appeal to the 8yo, and because I normally use them in a lot of dishes, and I've been missing them.

For dessert I used the Meyer lemons from week 1 in sandwich cookies I adapted from the original recipe here. I'm the lemon fan in the house, so guess who ate most of the cookies? LOL

Not Really a Harvest Monday

Maybe next week there will be something, but this week I only harvested 1 cup's worth of Purple and Italian basil which I made into a pesto. I didn't take a picture of it because it's been a pretty busy weekend, and I didn't get around to charging my camera battery. I used most of the pesto on focaccia, asiago, pesto and grilled chicken sandwiches last night for dinner. This has to be my new favorite sandwich...

I did, however, take a picture of my first batch of cherries I made from last week's harvest! I made Martha Stewart's Cherry Slab Pie.

This pie will have you feeling absolutely giddy...

BTW, if you don't have a cherry pitter, needle-nosed pliers work splendidly.

I pitted and froze the rest of the unused cherries to use when my mom-in-law visits next month since they're her favorite. I have a feeling I'll be making another slab pie for the 4th of July...

Since I don't have any harvesting going on, here are a few updates.
I killed my potato plants after digging the potatoes out. They're the two in the green pots, and the two in front. I was either too rough, or maybe it's from the 90 degree heat we're having (it's about time it warmed up).

Most of my lettuces bolted. Even though they were shaded, and my thermometer read a high of 80 degrees. I guess when the package says it can handle 80 degrees, it meant ever once in a while. At least it won't be long before I can start this mix over again, and then I'll have a nice head start on my fall lettuces.

We had more high winds at the end of last week. Time to get Boy Wonder out there to pick up the fruit before the ants and mice move in. click for carnage

On to the happy plants! Both sets of melons are flowering, although all male flowers at the point.

Even the almost-dead melon plant is making a come back.

I've been mistakenly calling these tomatoes "Pearson," but they're Viva Italia.

This is the Pearson tomato, and my first and only so far. It's a heavy lil guy too!

I haven't really talked about the few succulent plants from last year's acquisition that survived an outbreak of scale, were moved outside after the outbreak without hardening off, and endured a few nights of freezing temps, but here are two that are now blooming. A Hen & Chicks, and one I don't know about...

Summer vacation officially started today, so I'm off to hang out with the 8yo before the 2yo wakes up from his nap...