Week 15: September 9

In This Week’s Beet Box:

New Produce: Napa Cabbage & Fingerling Potatoes
September Strawberries
Fennel Pesto
Shifting into Fall
Sweet Peppers by the Bag!
Calapooia Garlic by the Bag or the Braid!

In your share this week:

Walla Walla Sweet Onions
Napa Cabbage
Carrots
Fennel
Dill
Head Lettuce
Sweet Peppers
Hot Peppers
Fingerling Potatoes
Strawberries
Zucchini
Tomatoes – Red & Heirloom

On Rotation:

This means that some pickup sites will receive it this week, others next week – or in a future week.

Cucumbers
Cherry Tomatoes

NEW PRODUCE OF THE WEEK

Napa Cabbage: This has to be tops on my list of favorite cabbages: tender, sweet, versatile. It’s tender enough to stand in for lettuce, or cabbage-y enough to hold it’s own in slaw. Here are a couple good recipes off our website (I make a lot of the napa-apple-nut salad at this time of year):

http://www.valleyflorafarm.com/recipe_search/results/napa%20cabbage

Napa is also the cabbage of choice for making kimchi, or Korean pickles. This is a relatively quick, easy recipe if you’ve never tried it before:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/quick-spicy-kimchee-recipe/index.html

Napa stores best in a plastic bag in the fridge. It won’t last as long as a red or green hard cabbage, but you should get a week or two out of it.

Fingerling Potatoes: Whimsical and weird-looking, this is a variety called Russian Banana. Fingerling are usually described as “waxy” in texture, meaning they’re a firmer, drier potato than most. The most common preparations are to either roast them or boil/steam them for use in a salad. Store in your fridge in plastic bag.

This is about as simple and easy a dish you could make with them, using your fresh dill:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/dill-fingerling-potatoes-recipe/index.html

September Strawberries

Every strawberry harvest in September feels like a bonus to us, given the uncertain weather as we slide towards Fall. As soon as the rain and cool weather arrive with any earnestness, it will shut down the strawberries for good.

This recent blast of sun, however, has made for some good late-season picking. The berries have ramped up so much in the past week, there's enough to fill some last-minute, late season special orders. If you want to order a flat, email me your name, pickup site, daytime phone number, and the number of flats you want.

Take note that September’s sweet berries also tend to have a shorter shelf life. There’s more mold pressure from all the morning dew, and they tend to be more fragile overall. We painstakingly try to cull every berry that has any sign of rot, but even so they sometimes slip by us during the 6-hour strawberry pick on Tuesday and Friday mornings – so please forgive the occasional mold bomb that might light up your pint of berries if you let them sit for a day or two. Sooner is better when it comes to eating September strawberries! Enjoy the last few pints coming your way this season.

Fennel Pesto

I'm always looking for new ways to convert the fennel skeptics in the crowd, so I was extra-excited to try this fennel pesto recipe that my dad and stepmother discovered. They were kind enough to post it to our website. I swooned. Hope you do, too.

http://www.valleyflorafarm.com/content/fennel-recipes

Shifting into Fall

September is a month of transition for us. We’re just wrapping up our last direct seedings and transplantings in the field, and the focus shifts markedly from putting seeds and plants in the ground to taking food out of the ground. Big harvests of storage crops like potatoes, onions, and winter squash are upon us and it seems that no bin weighs less than 30 pounds at this time of year. From now on as the food gets heavier, we do a lot of bending at the knees. Core strength! Steady now!

Sweet Peppers by the Bag!

The sweet peppers are on! Order now to get ‘em in bulk for fresh eating or preserving. You can choose from either:

Roasters: 5 pounds of sweet red roasters
Jellybean Mix: 5 pounds of mixed bells and roasters - red, orange, yellow, purple (no green)

The cost is $20/bag. Orders will be fulfilled on a rolling basis in the order received (pepper season usually goes into October). To order, please email us:

Your name
Your pickup location
Best daytime phone number to reach you
The type and quantity of peppers you would like (in 5 pound increments).

Peppers preserve wonderfully.

Frozen: just dice them up raw and toss them into a freezer bag.
Roasted: blacken the outer skin over an open flame, toss them into in a lidded pot to steam, peel the skin off once they’ve cooled, lay the roasted peppers on cookie sheets to freeze individually, then transfer to a freezer bag.

Either way, they are a great addition to wintertime meals – pasta sauces, stir fries, soups, lasagna, and more!

Garlic by the Bag or the Braid!

For some reason, we’re unable to grow garlic at the farm. Each time we’ve planted it, we lose the entire crop to white rot, rust, flooding, or other diseases. After enough disappointments we’ve stopped trying altogether.

Our long-time family friends have a small organic farm called Calapooia Crossing. They are located on the Calapooia River in the foothills of the Cascades and they excel at growing garlic. Last year they brought us part of their harvest and we sold it at the farmstand, to wide acclaim. They just delivered this year’s crop to us, so we have a couple hundred pound of beautiful garlic for the offering. It’s available at the farmstand, but for those of you who can’t make the trip, we’re happy to deliver bulk bags to your pickup site.

Here's the scoop if you want to order:

Bulk garlic is available in 3 pound bags, $25 per bag. (There are about 5 large heads of garlic per pound, so a bulk bag contains approximately 15 heads of garlic. It’s a hardneck variety, meaning the head has a central stem with a ring of large, easy-to-peel cloves around the stem.)

Garlic braids are also available, $12 apiece. Braids contain approximately 7 heads of softneck garlic called Italian Late. It’s the best keeper and makes a beautiful gift.

If you’d like to order, please email us: