Happy Harvest September 28, 2012

HAPPY HARVEST September 28, 2012

**This is our 20th and final CSA pickup up the season!**But keep visiting us on Fridays for our on-farm Farmers Market, Fridays in October (except oct 19)

CSA members choose 8 from the following harvest items, so many season choices combining fall crops and lingering summer crops:

Sweet Japanese turnips are back for a sweet and crispy fall turnip!

Butternut squash–use this creamy squash in soups and pies and squash puree, to replace cooked pumpkin in any recipe.

acorn squash–try out Milli’s recipe (Ilene’s Mom!): cut them in half, scoop the seeds out, and bake them with orange juice, honey/maple syrup, and raisins in the middle.350 degrees until soft.

garlic–see tips on freezing garlic, its on the blog. Preserve the harvest!

Specialty Purple Sweet potatoes–OH MY we have this Japanese sweet potatoes with purple skins and white flesh. OH MY they are creamy sweet and delicious. Really beautiful mixed with regular orange sweet potatoes in a batch of mixed baked sweet potato fries– slice them into sticks, toss lightly with olive oil and spices, spread onto baking sheet and bake at 410 degrees til slightly browning and soft (35 minutes?).

We might also have some regular orange sweet potatoes cured and ready to go.

tomatoes–mix of reds, heirlooms and romas (slowing down but still here! thank you, lovely hoophouse)

jalapenos–still making some fresh salsa?

basil (mainly sweet still producing, maybe red or thai)

bell peppers, and pimentos and italian long peppers–likely plenty of reds

sweet potato greens–sauteed green vegetable

Leaf Lettuce–another great fall crop that we are so grateful to harvest. You don’t know how challenging it is to get lettuce to germinate and grow in hot August, compete with summer bugs and survive transplanting in the heat. Thanks to Phil’s new sprinklers misting over the plants in their first days after transplanting, the plants thrived.

Chinese Cabbage–its beautiful and delicate, I eat it raw like lettuce but its great lightly sauteed as well. Or make a batch of kimchi!

We might have some extra white potatoes for the table too, and we’ll see what else is out there.

UPICK THIS WEEK

herb garden–looking good: sage, parsley, chives, oregano, sorrell. Try lemongrass, the bunch of grass in the herb garden row. Ask us how to harvest it.

RECIPE IDEA

I have been making lettuce wraps with the delicate Funjen Chinese Cabbage–oh boy, is FunJen a fun kid-food! Wraps are good with lots of fillings: rice, ground beef/turkey/tofu, chicken, beans, chopped veggies raw or cooked. Make leftover wraps! The magic ingredient for me is a yummy peanut dipping sauce. Look up a recipe for Thai Dipping Sauce with a peanut butter base. My kids are messy with these, but that’s fun and they down lots of cabbage leaves this way.

ABOUT SWEET POTATOES

Did you Know? Sweet potatoes are starchy when first dug up. We cure them for a week in warm, humid conditions and their starches turn to sugar! The curing process is one reason why our sweet potatoes are so yummy sweet. They are good just simply baked, you don’t need to add anything to them. We grow a lot of sweet potatoes so we can sell them to The Common Market through the fall. Maybe they’ll be available there through Thanksgiving. We will also offer sweet potatoes in our weekly fall Farmers Market.