*late fall and early winter greens growing in the tunnels, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato, rainbow chard, pea shoots, green cabbage, giant green cabbage, bok choi, brussels crowns, brussels sprouts
Roots: red potatoes, yellow potatoes, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, baby carrots
Alliums: scallions, yellow onions, red onions, sweet onions, fresh garlic bulbs, shallots, leeks
Herbs: sage, parsley, thyme, bulk pesto basil
Fruiting crops: heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, tomatillos, shishito peppers, jalapeno peppers, poblano peppers, sweeet red Italian Carmen peppers, aji rico red hot peppers, green Italian peppers, husk cherries
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, fennel

Crop Report

If you didn’t catch the writeup last week, brussels crowns are the growing tips from the top of the brussels sprout plant. They are amazing sauteed or cooked like any other cooking green. If you’re interested in processing any peppers for the winter, we have lots of jalapeno peppers, red Carmen peppers, green carmen peppers, shishitos peppers available in the CSA pickup or to order in bulk. Our family loves having the red carmen peppers in the winter, sliced and frozen raw, to pull out and add to ground beef in the winter to add color and flavor. We also really love pouring a vinegar pickling brine over jars of sliced jalapenos, onions, and carrots and storing the pickled jalapenos in the fridge to add to eggs or tacos. The tomato plants have all been harvested, and the full sized fruit is continuing to ripen off the vine in the greenhouse. We’ll have tomatoes for a few more weeks, although in the fall they aren’t at the peak of their epicurial potential…still great but not the same a sliced tomato still warm from the mid-August sun. The fennel is a fun item to use this time of the year to add depth to familiar recipes: when sautéing or caramelizing onions in any dish that calls for them, add a fennel bulb to the chopped onions too.

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag to Ludlow or Rutland

Farm News

Wow, so many of you loved my ramblings on scrappy veggie use last week! Somone asked where some of my cooking strategies came from, and I suppose I can point to four specific influences that contributed to my more creative uses of food:

In college, I did a semester at sea program where we would be on the ocean for extended periods of time and just have access to whatever was successfully hanging on in galley storage during the long stretches.. Every student had to spend 3 days throughout the semester helping with meals, and I seemed to get days that landed far from our land re-supply, and it really made me think out of the conventional box.

The second creative influence was a housemate I lived with my junior year of college, who was just not afraid of going completely wild in the kitchen and break many conventional assumptions of how to use ingredients or what could successfully be cooked with what. He basically broke down the ingrained expectations I understood about how to cook and set my cooking brain free.

The crunchiest and longest influence was my time being in charge of a weekly community meal when we lived in Hardwick eons ago. Once a week, the community came together and made a free meal for whoever wanted to join. (I especially appreciated the format because it provided folks who needed a meal a non-stigmatized space to eat and gather since anyone was welcome, even if folks had the means to feed themselves. It brought many parts of the community together over a meal every week.) I helped the facilitator for a few months, but when he went abroad for an extended period of time, he put me in charge of the weekly event. I had to create a soup, salad, hot main dish, and dessert for 125 people. In addition to a weekly $40 budget, I had all the raw cow milk, potatoes, and beets from the farm I lived on, access to the “farmer” section of the walk-in cooler of a local veggie farm, and some products at the local co-op that couldn’t be sold because they were past their “best by” date. I would get moving early, hauling gallons of milk and bags of roots from home, stop by Riverside Farm and see what seconds veggies they had to use from their “farmer” section, collect all the un-sellable products from the co-op, and then look at that haul to craft that soup, salad, main dish, and dessert, and then use that $40 to buy whatever ingredients I needed to tie it all together. It made me wildly creative to have to concoct a 4-course meal with random free food and $0.32 per person.

The fourth main influence would have to be growing up with my mom’s meals. All the creativity in the world would be useless unless the food actually tastes good. I was lucky to grow up in a house with nightly homemade sit-down family meals that were delicious, and although I didn’t do much cooking alongside my mom at a young age, remembering her flavors and meals as I started cooking as a young adult certainly made an impact on my own kitchen projects.

This week on the farm we nearly finished all the tunnel transitions, with almost all the beds composted and either seeded or transplanted to winter greens. We got the first nips of patchy frost and tucked in the outdoor peppers to try to extend their fruiting for a little longer. The team continued working away at snipping and storing all the curing alliums in the prop house, and then we got a jump on starting some of our bulk storage harvests. We will start harvesting the winter squash, though some varieties need to cure a bit before we start sending them out.

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Vanessa, Taylor, Katie, Galen, Leah, Natalie, Cindy, Amelia, Morgan, Hannah, and Grandpa Jim the delivery guy (and Sky and Soraya)

Red Pepper Bruschetta