This Week’s Share
- Carrots
- Dill
- Eggplant
- Garlic
- Kale, Winterbor
- Leeks
- Lettuce
- Peppers, Green
- Summer Squash
- Tomatoes, Heirloom, Slicing and/or Saucing,
- Turnips, Hakurei
This week begins our transition into fall crops. Turnips, kale and leeks are a nod to the colder, wetter days ahead. Winter squash will be in your shares next week. And this week we are saying goodbye to tomatoes and summer squash. We are still hoping for a little more sun to finally turn all the green peppers red, yellow or orange.
Recipes
Hakurei Turnips make wonderful pickles. Here are two different pickle dishes both from Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East Vegetarian Cooking. Pickle dishes are a great way to preserve foods. These raw foods also have wonderful pro-biotic qualities. Just keep them covered and press the air out of the jars. You will know if your pickles turn because bad pickles smell bad. You can always cure your pickled in your refrigerator but they will take much longer to pickle.
Carrot and Turnip Pickles- from India
½ lb carrots washed and trimmed to ¼-inch think rounds
½ lb turnips quartered lengthwise
5 tsps whole black mustard seed coarsely ground
¾ to 1 tsp hot pepper (you can use your Jalapeño or Serrano is you still have one)
2 tsps salt
1 cup mustard oil
About 3 tsp brown sugar
Bring 3 cups water to a boil and throw in carrots and turnips. Return to a rapid boil and blanch for just 5 seconds. Drain thoroughly and allow to completely dry on a towel. Make a paste out of the mustard seeds, hot pepper, ½ cup of the mustard oil and salt. Add the vegetables and mix. Put the contents into a quart jar, and pack down to get out air pockets and cover with a breathable lid (non-metallic). Place the jar in a warm spot stirring once a day for 3 or 4 days. Add the remaining mustard oil and mix well and continue to let the pickle sour for 3 or 4 days more. Don’t worry, your pickle won’t rot if you are keeping it well stirred. Then stir in sugar to taste and store in the refrigerator. This pickle can keep for several weeks.
Spicy Turnip Pickle- from Korea
½ lb turnips cleaned and slices into 1/16 inch thick half moons
2 tsp salt
½ to 1 whole hot pepper (dried red preferred but you could use Jalapeño or Serrano)
1 tbs minced leek, scallion or other onion
3 cloves of garlic peeled and minced
¼ tsp sugar
In a bowl toss turnips with 1 ½ tsp salt and set aside for 2 to 3 hours. Drain slices and rinse with cold water and drain again. Add the remaining ½ tsp salt and as well as the hot pepper, onion, garlic, and sugar to the turnips and mix well. Put the mix in a small jar and add enough water to just cover (pushing out the air bubbles with a butter knife) and loosely cover with a small saucer and set aside in refrigerated for 6-8 days. Taste, and if the pickle has soured to your liking then put in refrigerator and keep for weeks.
Both of these pickle recipes are delicious with plain while rice.
Dried Dill
Divide your bunch into 2 or 3 smaller bunches and hang inside of a small paper bag. Use a rubber band to cinch the dill stems at the opening of the paper bag. Hang the bag with the dill in it in a warm dry place (like a window). Gently shake the bag every few days, you don’t want the air in the bag to get too humid and stale. After 5 or 7 days open the bag and check on moisture. The dill is well dried when it is easily crumbled. Crumble and store in a glass jar out of the light. Now you have perfectly dried dill for use in salad dressings, marinades etc…
Smetana Sauce
Adapted from the Book of Sauces by Gordon Grimsdale
Use some of your fresh dill in this sauce. It is delicious over baked salmon or chicken
1 large or 2 small leeks, finely chopped
2 tbs butter
1/3 cup dry white wine
1tsp white flour
1 cup sour cream
2 tbs lemon juice
2 tbs fresh chopped dill
Salt and pepper to taste
Sauté leeks in butter till golden. Add wine and increase heat and boil till reduced to half original volume. Stir flour into sour cream. Stir in Dill. Slowly add sour cream mix to hot liquid stirring constantly. Bring to a boil very briefly then remove from heat. Add lemon and slat and pepper to taste and serve immediately.
Japanese Eggplant
A traditional Japanese preparation by Sayaka Terada
Up to 1 cup Canola Oil
3-5 Eggplants sliced into ¼ inch think rounds
Dark red Miso Paste
1 tbs. ginger
3 tbs. tamari or soy sauce
2 tsp sugar
Heat oil in a frying pan and fry eggplant pieces until soft. Set aside to drain. Whisk together tamari, sugar, and ginger and set aside as a dipping sauce. Set eggplant out on a dish and smear top side with a generous swipe of miso. Serve room temperature and dip bites in to sauce. Serve with white rice.
Help us get Ready to Plant Garlic
The garlic we plant each October is not harvested until the following July. It is amazing to think that the garlic cloves we planted last October and harvested this July will now start the cycle again, becoming food for all of you next summer.
We save 25% of the garlic we grow for seed. Each head of garlic needs to be separated into individual cloves for planting. We call this “popping” garlic. Since we plant about a 1/2 acre of garlic we need about 29,000 cloves to plant. Heads of garlic will yield an average of six seeds so you can see we have a lot of garlic to “pop”.
For the next 3 Fridays you are invited to help us “pop” the garlic. This is a relatively cushy farm job for we do it sitting down under cover. Please join us on Friday October 10, 17 and/or 24 from 9-12 or 1-4 to be part of this amazing cycle. All you need to bring is a warmly dressed self. Hope to see you on the farm.