Week 7: July 19
What’s in your Share This Week?
Head lettuce
Strawberries
Broccoli
Sugar Snap Peas
Cucumbers
Red Cabbage
Easter Egg Radishes
Rainbow Chard
Basil or Parsley
On Rotation:
Basil & Parsley
The New Stuff: How to eat it, cut it, cook it, and keep it:
Red Cabbage
The goal this year was to grow SMALL cabbages, not the basketball-sized lunkers that came out of the field last year. We’ve mostly succeeded, with most of the cabbages from this harvest weighing in at about 3 pounds. There will still a few six pounders that came in on the truck, but for the most part a tighter planting spacing seems to have helped keep the cabbages from getting too intimidating (AND we can get the lids on the totes this year!).
This variety is called Red Express, an open-pollinated early red variety. Over the course of the season you’ll also experience green cabbage, savoy cabbage and napa cabbage from the farm.
Cabbage is easy to grow in our relatively cool coastal climate, and is a great standby veggie to have in your fridge. It will keep in a plastic bag for weeks and weeks (just slice off the browned edge of a cut cabbage to reveal fresh layers beneath), and is wonderful raw or lightly cooked. We’ll often make slaw with ours (check out our all-time favorite Kaleslaw recipe – you could use your kale from last week, or sub in this week’s rainbow chard). It’s also tasty steamed lightly and doused with olive oil, salt and cider vinegar. It stir-fries well, or can be boiled with a chopped onion for five minutes and added to mashed potatoes. Last but not least, you could give wild fermentation a try: sauerkraut or kimchi. Angela provided a great kimchi recipe this week, which uses both your radishes and cabbage. Fermented foods like kraut and kimchi tend to be tangy, salty, sometimes a little spicy – and one of the secrets to a long, healthy life!
Easter Egg Radishes
These colorful bunches of radishes might even convince your kids to take a bite! They’re a fun way to dress up a salad or a veggie platter. Store, topped, in a plastic bag in the fridge and they’ll keep for a few weeks.
On the Farm…
The heavy foods are starting to hit their stride on the farm: cabbages, cucumbers, beets, potatoes, big heads of broccoli. We are transitioning out of the spring greens glut and into the heartier fare of summertime. It’s always a fun, colorful, and sometimes back-breaking time of year for us farmers, but above all, it’s a great time to eat! We hope your life is affording the time to linger over the table, to get inspired in the kitchen, and to let your harvest basket shape your meals each day.
I recently came across an amazing recipe resource, courtesy of another farm in California, Capay Organics. They actually run the largest CSA in the country – called “Farm Fresh to You” - with over 4,000 members! They have an incredible recipe index on their website, organized and searchable by individual food items –veggies, fruit and much more. Check it out at: http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com/recipes/
