Alright veggie-loving locavores, you know what time it is, right? It’s pick-your-farm-share time!
Read on to get some help with picking your share AND to hear about a new company that may make the whole farm-share experience more personal and easy to navigate. Continue reading
This was such a packed month of cooking that I broke the post up into two parts. This is part two and covers the desserts, canned goods, and fermented projects for the month. If you are interested in what came in our share this month and the main-course dishes we made, check out this post.
Picking up where we lift off in the last post, here are the sweet and unique ways that I used the fruits and vegetables in our farm share.
If you want to eat dessert for breakfast, you’ve come to the right place. I’m nothing but an enabler on this front, BUT only if the dessert is fruit-based. No, wait, I also eat cake with my coffee.
This was a good month for feeding my dessert-for-breakfast habit. With weekly peach deliveries, and a few weeks with plums, there was plenty of fruit for the baking.
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Stone fruit tea cake (from Rustic Fruit Desserts) : peaches and plums
We made this cake twice during the month, the first time with just peaches, the second time with peaches and plums. Even though it’s called a cake, Calder and I both thought that it was the best cobbler we’ve ever tasted. It’s delicious straight from the oven with vanilla ice cream.
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Peach crisp (a simplification of the apple crisp recipe in the King Arthur Flour Cookbook) : peaches
I have to confess that I made this for our camping trip with the full intention to only eat it for breakfast. I packed a few small cups of Greek yogurt, and the combination was perfect.
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NYTimes {famous} Plum Torte : plums, eggs
I came across this recipe after reading the NYTimes article about it being the paper’s most requested recipe.
I don’t know why my plums sunk. Is it the altitude? No matter, the torte was still amazingly delicious. I think the boys and I ate half of it for our afternoon snack before Calder even got home from work! We have a few plums left, and I’m thinking of making this one more time for the season.
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I have to admit that for all of my interest in learning new things and experimenting, I’ve shied away from home fermentation projects. I always thought of it as such a risky venture with the chance for contamination, but after being gifted a few fermentation-related tools (this mason jar fermenting set and a couple of ceramic fermenting weights), I thought it was time to give it a try.
I’m working on both a jar of giardiniera and another of sauerkraut. Neither batch is done yet, but this is the week I get to test both, and when they’re done, whether good or bad, I’m excited to do a follow-up post to share my results along with a deeper discussion about why fermented foods are good for your gut.
*This isn’t my first foray into fermenting. It all started with kombucha! This is just my first time throwing vegetables into the mix.
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Giardiniera : basil, onion, carrots, broccoli, green bell pepper
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Sauerkraut (from Preserving by the Pint) : cabbage
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I’m hoping to do some more canning this fall, but keeping my expectations in check, I’m focusing on small-batch canning. A couple of great resources that I heavily rely on for small-scale canning are the books Food in Jars and Preserving by the Pint. Both are written by Marissa McClellan, who writes a canning-focused blog called Food in Jars (another great resource for canning recipes, tips, and tricks).
If you’re nervous about canning, then doing a small batch is a great way to start. You can do it with the pots already in your kitchen, so you aren’t investing in new equipment. You can also do it with a smaller quantity of produce, so the prep-time is less, as is the clean-up, and it’s not a big loss if the batch fails (it won’t).
This month, I focused my canning efforts on that big box of peaches we received, making both a peach salsa and a peach bbq sauce.
Peach BBQ Sauce (from Preserving by the Pint) : peaches, onion
The BBQ sauce recipe makes about two half-pint jars. We’ve been using it on grilled skinless and boneless chicken thighs this month, and it’s so good that I ended up making three batches of the sauce so that I’d have enough to pass around to my family!
Peach Salsa (from Food in Jars) : peaches, onion, bell pepper, jalapeno
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Needless to say it was an exciting month in the kitchen. We tried so many new-to-us dishes, and all were delicious! I can’t wait to see what the month ahead brings, and I’m really excited to push myself to try even more canning and fermentation recipes.
Officially, the boys and I were on the east coast for month 3, and the food I’m sharing below is from month 4, so we may have missed some late summer veggies, but we’re jumping feet first into fall and calling this month 3 of recipes. While we were away, it was Calder’s job to eat all of the food and blog about it…
This month seems to have been more plentiful than previous months. We’re seeing a natural change in what’s being harvested from crops with shorter growing seasons, like radishes and turnips, to some of the slower-growing crops, like corn and carrots. We’ve also been the lucky recipients of a full case of Colorado peaches. With all of this food, I realized that I have a lot more to share this month and am breaking the post up into two parts. Today I’m sharing most of the main course recipes and in the second post I’ll follow-up with desserts, canned goods, and fermented foods.
… and it’s so frustrating that the days are getting shorter as the veggie boxes are getting heavier!
Early in the month, I leaned on a couple of my favorite cookbooks, Jerusalem and Plenty, for new vegetable recipes. If you like to experiment in the kitchen and are open to trying new spices and food combinations, I recommend both books. Jerusalem includes meat and vegetable dishes, but Plenty is all vegetable.
I haven’t discussed it much on the blog, but I’m part of a cookbook club, and I’m excited to host our October meeting where we’ll be cooking from Jerusalem. I can’t wait to taste all of the dishes and document our meeting for a future post!
The table below lists the variety of foods that we’ve received for the past month. I don’t know the exact quantity of vegetables we receive each week (it’s a large grocery bag filled with veggies, and I would say it’s about 20+ lbs), definitely enough to feed our family for the week. During the month of September, the vegetables have been some combination of those on the list below. In the protein category, we receive about 3-5 lbs of meat each week, made up of a combination of the items on the list. The tofu and tempeh each arrive once per month. Under the dairy & misc. category, we receive the yogurt & cheeses each week, we receive 1 lb of coffee once per month, and approximately two canned goods each week. While in season, we receive fresh fruit and some variety of fresh herbs.
| veggies | proteins | dairy & misc. | fruit & herbs |
|---|---|---|---|
| cucumbers | stewing chickens | herbed goat cheese | peaches! |
| green lettuce | hot German sausage | camembert | plums |
| carrots | italian sausage | yogurt | basil |
| cabbage | bacon | coffee | parsley |
| eggplant | ground beef | fruit jam | dill |
| onions | tofu | pickles | sage |
| zucchini | tempeh | edible flowers | |
| summer squash | eggs | ||
| mushrooms | |||
| beets | |||
| chard | |||
| kale | |||
| kohlrabi | |||
| peppers | |||
| broccoli | |||
| leeks | |||
| radishes |
Above each photograph, I list the farm share ingredients used for the dish and, where available, I’ve linked to the recipes. Where necessary, I also include some notes about that day’s meal.
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Cucumber salad with smashed garlic and ginger (from Plenty) : cucumbers, onion, herbs
This was a delicious and refreshing side dish for a summer meal. It was a bit spicy for the boys, so we had plenty of leftovers, and I loved eating it on rye bread with humus (it was good that just typing that makes me was to make more right now).
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Teryaki tempeh : tempeh
We liked this DIY teryaki sauce enough that it’s worth keeping for future recipes.
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Chard with tahini, yogurt, and buttered pine nuts (from Jerusalem) : chard
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Roasted eggplant with buttermilk sauce (from Jerusalem) : eggplant, peaches
This ingredient combination may seem odd, but it was amazing! So good, in fact, that we ate this dish at least three different times over the month. The original recipe called for pomegranate seeds, but since we had an abundance of peaches, I decided to experiment. Luckily, the odds were in our favor and this turned out so delicious that now we’re excited to experiment with other fruits. Pears? slightly cooked apples? definitely pomegranates.
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Squash casserole : zucchini & yellow squash, goat cheese, eggs
I added fresh dill and dill goat cheese to the casserole, and I subbed panko bread crumbs for the crushed crackers that were called for in the recipe. I served this casserole with round two of the roasted eggplant and some sauteed paneer with Indian spices.
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Scotch eggs! : Italian sausage, eggs
I only had a Scotch egg once in my life, but loved it enough that I was craving one three years later. If you’ve never had one a Scotch egg is a hardboiled egg wrapped in sausage, coated in bread crumbs, and deep fried. I barely had enough bread crumbs and vegetable oil to make this batch, but they turned out delicious and have me excited to make another batch!
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Chard with tofu and black bean sauce, stir-fried rice : chard, tofu, onion, corn, bell pepper, carrots, eggs
For a while we were ordering Chinese about once a week from a local restaurant. That habit has transferred to our favorite pizza
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veggie burritos with homemade peach salsa (more on that tomorrow!) : onions, green peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, sauteed greens, peaches, chicken, green chili goat cheese
The next day, I used the leftover burrito ingredients to make an amazing burrito bowl for lunch : just pile everything into a bowl over the rice and enjoy!
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Savory vegetable pie : collard greens, caramelized onions, parsley, mint, potatoes
I baked this pie on a Friday and we took it with us the next day on a weekend camping trip. It served as the perfect, portable lunch on both Saturday and Sunday, with many small slices eaten as between-meal snacks.
I didn’t follow a specific recipe, just looked at a few things and came up with this formula: place the bottom crust inside a pie dish, add the sauteed greens and mushrooms mixed with the caramelized onions and fresh herbs, add a layer of grated cheddar cheese, top with a layer of cooked diced potatoes that are lighted mashed/blended with some buttermilk (could sub regular milk for less tang), add the top crust, and bake in a 350F oven until done.
While I’m comfortable making quiches, this was my first savory pie. It came out so delicious (and easy to serve) that I’m excited to make a few more this fall and winter. I think they’ll be perfect for dinner-time picnics in the park or packed lunches on ski days.
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Burgers, grilled corn, and kohlrabi salad (salad recipe from Jerusalem, but we didn’t love it) : ground beef, corn, kohlrabi
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soba noodles with mushrooms : mushrooms, leeks
We had such a great combination of mushrooms this month! I don’t know the names of all of them pictured below, but as soon as we saw them, we were excited to do something special with them.
This dish is super simple, just sauteed leeks and mushrooms added to soba noodles in a miso broth. Its simplicity really lets the flavor of the mushrooms stand out, and their meatiness adds a nice hearty texture to the dish.
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Salads : lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, peppercorn goat cheese
Nothing special here, just delicious simple salads. I really loved adding the peppercorn goat cheese to the salads (and the carrot soup), and am thinking that I may be hooked on this as a new garnish.
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Light vegetable soup : onion, carrots, broccoli, green pepper, yellow squash
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Carrot soup : onion, potato, carrots, collard greens, leeks, chicken broth (from the stewing chickens), peppercorn goat cheese
There’s nothing I love more than adding some good garnishes to a blended root vegetable soup. For this one, I sauteed the greens with leeks and garlic. After placing the greens on the soup, I sprinkled it with some of the peppercorn goat cheese.
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Beet tart : sauteed greens, caramelized onions, roasted beets, goat cheese.
After seeing an apple tart where the apple slices were arranged in a rosette on top of the tart, I wanted to try to make a savory version using beets. This was my first go at it, and while it tasted good (we ate it all!), I think there’s room for improvement in both the presentation and the taste… I’m sure I’ll have an update with a recipe in a future post!
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Pesto : basil
I don’t use a particular recipe for making pesto, although it would be handy since there are times where I forget key ingredients (cheese! garlic!). Calder doesn’t like pine nuts, so I made this batch with walnuts, and think it’s just as delicious.
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And that’s it for the main courses. Looking back, we ate so well this past month! Tomorrow I’ll post the desserts, canned goods, and fermentation projects from the month.
This summer we have a farm share, and in many (good) ways, it’s consuming my life. I dream about it. Talk about it to anyone who will listen. Spend a bit of time planning my meals and then even more time chopping ingredients, based on our weekly delivery.
The challenge to signing up for a farm share is being ready to cook with whatever comes in your box that week and not knowing exactly what you’ll be getting next week, so you can’t plan too far in advance. Since we’re about a month into our share, I thought it would be fun to share this experience with you. I’ve been photographing our weekly deliveries as well as the meals that I’ve made with the produce and meat, and I’m going to share my meal plans here throughout the course of our farm share season.
If you don’t know about a farm share, also known as community supported agriculture, let me explain. This is a farming business method where consumers are asked to sign-up and pay for their produce (and more) at the beginning of the growing season. The farmers use the investments from their customers to pay for the variety of costs they have to run their farm over the course of the growing season – anything from seeds and fertilizers to irrigation and labor costs. Then, throughout the growing season, everyone who has paid for a share in the farm receives fresh produce as it’s harvested. The share composition will change throughout the growing season as different crops go in and out of season.
By making that investment, the farms’ consumers are taking on some of the risk that goes with farming. If a big storm wipes out a particular crop, that loss doesn’t just fall on the farmer, instead it’s spread across all consumers and they will receive less or none of that crop. If it’s a great year for a particular crop, then all consumers will get more of that crop delivered in their share (two years ago I was overwhelmed by jalepenos and trying to figure out the best ways to preserve them).
This is also a great model if you like to eat seasonally and locally. You’re going to receive crops as they’re harvested, so the produce you receive will be as fresh as possible and it didn’t have to be picked before it was ripe because it doesn’t have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach you. As I mentioned above, the composition of your share will change throughout the growing season, this is exciting but can also take some time to get used to. It can be a bit boring when you’ve received a bunch of radishes each week for a month, (when really you’d only eat one bunch in a whole month!) but it pushes you to be more creative in the kitchen. Roasted radishes anyone?
As I had talked about two years ago when moving to Boulder, one of the things we were so excited about was moving to a place with such a strong local-food movement. We are surrounded by farms, farmers’ markets, and enough farm-share options to make your head spin.
This year we bought a share from Grant Family Farms. It’s one of the largest CSAs in our area, and we were already familiar with them because they delivered to the office where C worked two years ago, so at that time we had bought a small share. This year we decided to go big, and we bought their “all-in” kitchen share, and admittedly we feel so lucky that we were able to make that investment. For about six months, we’ll receive a weekly share that includes vegetables, herbs, fruit, meat (pork, chicken, beef, lamb), yogurt, cheese, eggs, mushrooms, canned goods. It’s amazing!
This is the share that we’ve signed up for.
The chart below lists the variety of foods that we’ve received for the past month. I don’t know the exact quantity of vegetables we receive each week (it’s large grocery bag filled with veggies, and I would say it’s about 20 lbs), but it’s definitely enough to feed our family for the week. For the first month, the vegetables have been some combination of those on the list below. In the protein category, we receive about 3-5 lbs of meat each week, and thus far it’s been some combination of the meats on the list. The tofu and tempeh each arrive once per month. Under the dairy & misc. category, we receive the yogurt & cheeses each week, we receive 1 lb of coffee once per month, and approximately two canned goods each week. While in season, we recieve fresh fruit (so far it’s been a lot of cherries!), and some variety of fresh herbs.
| veggies | proteins | dairy & misc. | fruit & herbs |
|---|---|---|---|
| asparagus | ground pork | herbed goat cheese | cherries |
| romaine lettuce | smoked pork slice | camembert | mint |
| bok choy | smoked pork shoulder | yogurt | lemon balm |
| radishes | bacon | coffee | sage |
| green onions | fryer chicken | canned tomatoes | thyme |
| onions | pork sausage | tomato sauce | parsley |
| spinach | ground beef | pickles | cilantro |
| summer squash | tempeh | fruit jam | dill |
| mushrooms | tofu | ||
| beets | |||
| chard | |||
| turnips | |||
| tomatoes |
When I receive the share each week, I draft a list of menu ideas for the week ahead, trying to use up as much of that week’s share as I can, and planning for how I’ll preserve what we can’t eat (so far it’s just been putting some of the cherries and meat items in the freezer).
Over the past month, I’ve thrown herbs into salads, made my fair share of quiches, and had plenty of yogurt breakfasts, in addition, I’ve photographed some of the dinners we prepared and shared. Above each photograph, I list the farm share ingredients used for the dish and, where available, I’ve linked to the recipes.
Since I’ve photographed many of these dishes in the crazy moment between pulling them out of the oven and putting them on the table for starving boys, the photo quality isn’t the best, but I’m working on it :-).
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Lasagna : pork sausage, spinach, tomato sauce
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Vegetable Curry : tofu, carrots, scallions, summer squash, zucchini, cilantro
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Salmon with roasted radishes, chard with caramelized onions, and leftover rice from takeout : radishes, chard, onions
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Zucchini bread with chocolate chips, walnuts, and black sesame seeds : zucchini
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Mushroom tart & roasted vegetables : mushrooms, sage, goat cheese, carrots, zucchini, onions, turnips
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Roasted Root Vegetable Soup & Pork-filled Lettuce Wraps : ground pork, scallions, lettuce, beets, carrots, turnips, chard, beet greens, goat cheese
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Mushroom & Zucchini Galette : mushrooms, zucchini, onions, goat cheese
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Burgers & Salad : ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles
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Herb Meatballs & Green Couscous : ground pork, onions, mint, cilantro, parsley, dill. *Both of these recipes come from cookbooks by Yotam Ottolenghi that I love – Plenty & Jerusalem.
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Chicken, asparagus, and greens with black bean sauce : asparagus, chard, mizuna greens, onions, bacon
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Bacon & Eggs or Smoked Ham & Eggs have become breakfast staples
This is just a snapshot of our first month with the farm share. Right now our fridge is packed with this week’s share, and I’m so excited about the menus I have planned. I’m going to continue to photograph and share. I know meal planning, especially with kids, can be tough, but I hope this will give you some inspiration, and if you really need a kick in the bottom, get yourself a farm share!