Week 21, Season 2017-18; Peak Tomato

We celebrated Earth Day this last week with a farm clean up.  We gathered about 60 lbs of trash from the road and fields, mostly plastic trash.  Thank you to the boundless energy of the Steed family.  

While picking tomatoes this week the thought of peak tomato occurred to me.  Similar to the concept of peak oil.  We have reached peak tomato! The season is winding down and the crops are starting to show it.  We have reached the point in the tomato crop where maximum yield has occurred and now we are on the decline.  We have had a great tomato season with the varieties, ‘Celebrity,’ ‘Juliet,’ and ‘Charger.’  My peppers are doing very well and we have not reached “peak pepper” yet.

We are picking our potatoes and have had extremely tasty strawberry onions this year. 

Our corn plants are looking beautiful and I hope they can finish out strong.  They look like they will pick on our last week of the season. I am trying a new variety this year and it looks like we might get two ears per plant.  I can’t wait!

Around our house I have been watching collard greens in the crisper getting less and less crisp over a few weeks.  Jenn is reluctant to cook them as I am usually the only one who eats them.  So they hang out in the crisper until they are ready for composting.  This time I rescued them and tried something completely different.  Here is a recipe that I came up with.

In a deep frying pan, sauté a couple cloves in olive oil and then chop about a cup and a half of tomatoes and let them saute with the garlic.  While the garlic and tomatoes sauté, chop the collard greens and add them to the pan.  I add a little water at this point and create a steam with the lid.    You can add some pepper and salt or your favorite spices.  After the collards start to turn dark green turn the pan to a simmer and let it cook with lid on for about twenty or thirty minutes until tender.  Enjoy!  I even had some of the kids saying how good this was.  Now I look forward to seeing more collards in our crisper.

Here are a few pictures from the farm.

Collards, tomatoes, garlic, yum!

Tassels emerging

Guardian of the Corn

Week 2, 2017-18

Our first pick up went very well.  It is always great to catch up with our members who we haven't seen since May and greet our new members.  Jenn made zucchini muffins as a sweet add-on for everyone. 
It is always a little hard for me to shift back into harvest mode from production mode, as the work is under a time crunch.  I thank our volunteer friend Issy and the rest of the Steed family who made things much easier this time.
One thing that always happens at our first pick up is the question "What is that and what do I do with it?"  It is always fun to talk about the fresh produce we bring to the pick up tables and our favorite recipes that we use to eat them.  I never considered us to be "foodies" but since we have all this unique produce it sort of happens over time and I am now warming up to that definition.
Daikon radish is one of those vegetables we had at our first pickup. 
For all the folks who have no idea what to do with a diakon radish I have included some links with  recipes...

Here are a bunch of yummy recipes from Saveur Mag  https://www.saveur.com/article/collection/daikon-recipes

daikon fries - http://cookingontheweekends.com/2014/01/spicy-roasted-daikon-french-fry-recipe/

and these from New Hampshire NPR - http://nhpr.org/post/what-do-daikon-radishes#stream/0

We like to eat them roasted, fried, and in salads.

I hope this helps!

Week 16, Season 2016-2017

We have reached the two thirds point of the season and the growing is going well.  Cabbage, snow peas, red beets, cauliflower, and komatsuna will be picking this weekend for the first time this season.  I just planted corn, beans, and a few different squash this week.  I will be transplanting peppers, lettuce, cabbage, bok choi, kale (finally) and a few different items this week.  I also hope to plant cantaloupe and melon transplants and Seminole pumpkin seeds to finish out all this year's plantings.  Cucumbers were planted in the greenhouse this week.  Potatoes are up and running and looking fine.  The cauliflower was doing amazing and we had some that were about 10-12 inch heads.  I came back after the rainy days and they had hideous black spots all over the heads and I had to cut and toss them over the fence to the cattle.  It was a trial as we have done poorly in the past, so I was relieved that I actually could grow them.  We will be able to harvest about half of the trial section and I now will add that to our list of plants to pursue.
This is probably our last week of sweet potato harvests and am happy that we got about 13 weeks out of our planting.  I found a great recipe for you to try to say farewell to the sweet potatoes.  I serendipitously ran across a sweet potato soup recipe that was delicious and extremely easy.  It was in Cook's Illustrated magazine.  Did you know that if you have a Hillsborough County library card you can download tons of magazines to your reading device for free!  I happened to figure this out two weeks ago and was pursuing the magazine rack and saw Cook's Ill. and low and behold there was a great recipe for this soup.  All you need is sweet potatoes, shallots (I used onions), butter, thyme, and water.  That is it. I made it for a bunch of friends along with smoked ribs and everyone commented on how great the soup was.  Here is a link to the recipe.  https://www.cooksillustrated.com/videos/3101-sweet-potato-soup  Enjoy!    

Best Mustard Greens; Ever!

Mustard greens usually rank about third when it comes to my palate preference.  I usually place turnip first, collard and kale second, and mustards third.  I separate cabbage, Chinese cabbage, and bok choi out as a different class altogether. But I digress.  I found a recipe that elevated mustard greens to the top of the list.  Since I was unexpectedly surprised by the Thai fish soup recipe, I decided to try mustard greens Asian style.  Home run!  Jennifer didn't care for them as she doesn't even eat mustard greens (unless forced!), but Nate liked them.  Anna thought they were still too bitter.  I really liked them.  If you would like to try them, this is the link to the recipe.   http://allrecipes.com/recipe/218501/asian-inspired-mustard-greens/  I didn't have sesame seeds, sesame oil, or sake, so I substituted or omitted but it still came out great.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

By the way,  if your greens are looking limp and you want them to revive, just cut off the very end about a 1/4 inch and stick them in water.  Here is an unbelievable picture of before and after of turnips when treated in this manner.

Before

After!

Soup Recipe

When I took my kids to the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Ga we went to a catfish cleaning and cooking demonstration.  After the kids got showered by a spray of fish guts we watched a cooking demonstration from a chef who had a great take on a Thai soup.  It was delicious and the kids liked it. The only problem was that I didn't take any notes and the only thing I took to remember what he did was a picture.  So I tried making it from memory and the picture.  It is a great recipe for right now in our season and can be used with chicken or catfish.

My attempt at recreating this meal at home was a resounding success as the kids liked it and ate the potful down in an evening.  You can use bok choi, sweet potatoes, and cilantro from the farm.  Here is my attempt to convey the recipe to you.

Ingredients:
Can of coconut milk
1 box of vegetable/chicken stock
2-3 cloves of garlic
piece of ginger or dried ginger powder
soy sauce
vegetable oil 2 tablespoons
1-2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast or catfish fillets
1-2 sweet potatoes
1 bok choi
curry paste (2 tsp or to taste)
cilantro
1 lime

Saute a couple of cloves of garlic in a soup pan with some vegetable oil. When the garlic has browned a bit, add soy sauce and curry paste and stir up.  Next dice either boneless chicken breast or catfish and saute with the garlic.  When the meat is browned, add chicken/vegetable stock to a pot (3-4 cups) add a can of coconut milk.  Next chop some fresh ginger and add to the pot.  Then dice a sweet potato into very tiny cubes and add to the pot.  Next chop up a bok choi (you can use Chinese cabbage, spinach, probably mustard greens, or maybe even kale might work)  and add that to the soup towards the end of the process before the sweet potato gets too soft.  At the end, add cilantro and the juice of a lime to finish it off.  It takes about 20-30 minutes to finish.

Patty Pan Squash Recipes

I usually get a few questions about our produce each season in the form of "What can I do with it?"  So, since our plants have produced a super-abundance of patty pan squash  (aka scalloped squash) I thought I would give out some ideas.  Here are few ideas to try this fun oddity of the produce world to get the creative cooking flowing.

Stuffed with cheese and bacon:  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/39304/stuffed-pattypan-squash/
Stuffed with veggies and pecans:   http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/
Stuffed with rice and spinach:  http://southernfood.about.com/od/summersquash/r/r90708a.htm
OK you get the idea with stuffed.
How about grilled with salsa verde:  http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12632-grilled-or-roasted-pattypan
Grilled with Indian spice:  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/indian-spiced-grilled-baby-squash
You can also saute'
Sauted with basil and feta:  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/sauted-baby-squash-with-basil-feta
or fried:  http://www.newlyweds-blog.com/2010/06/15/fried-patty-pan-squash/
and lastly you can always bake them or turn them into soup.

Dixie Chicks are out

The mobile chicken coop.

We finally finished the mobile chicken coop. It took a while but it is in good order now. It was constructed from mostly recycled farm materials and some purchased bolts, chicken wire, and wood. I still need to finish their nesting area inside the coop but the run is complete. The chicks are so used to being confined in a box, they spent the entire day just peeking out of the entry way. We released them from the back of the coop and they walked around inside eating and pecking and jumping from everything that moved. After day three they are much better adapted and enjoying their new digs. I hope they are happy enough to lay eggs for us in the near future.

Dixie Chicks shy from the media

The rest of the farm is moving along. I planted our basil transplants and took cuttings to start some more. I also started the sweet potato vines, planted queen anne black eye peas and the white acre peas. I am still waiting for our tomatoes to turn red. They have sized up now but are still green. All the remaining lettuce has bolted. We lost a bunch but learned a lot.

The radishes did really well this year and are delicious. Last year I thought I would never try them again because they all split. This year they came out great. They are also my new favorite vegetable. I found that you can fry them in butter and salt and they taste great. I can hardly eat a radish raw. But they taste totally different when cooked. Thanks for the cooking tip Corner Store.

Pumpkin Recipe

One of our blog readers who also ordered some pumpkin seeds sent us a recipe for pumpkin soup. He says it's like Texas Chili, you can tweak to your own taste. Use one large pot (3-4 qt) filled with peeled, cubed pumpkin. Add 5 cups water and 5 cubes of chicken bullion. 1 large onion, quartered. Boil for 30-40 minutes. Puree adding add 1 stick margarine or butter, about 1 tsp fresh ground pepper and 1/2 cup half and half or whole milk. You can add garlic, parsley or other spices to change.
We still have seeds if you would like them. Refer to our previous post on how to get them.

Our new plot is doing alright. We have been harvesting cucumbers, mustards, mint (first harvest this week), oregano, and bok choy. I planted more mustards, collards, kale, lettuce again, carrots again, and cilantro. The older collards are starting to get bigger and will be harvesting soon. The cucumbers got hurt by an early frost last week. I'm not sure how much longer they will produce. I also planted a cover crop of a fall mix from Johnny's seeds and a crimson clover crop. I want to try the two to see which works best. That really was good for our summer crop. It helped me identify a real winner.