I am Awed and Inspired

We're visiting my sister in Colorado and she has a plot in the local community garden. 10'x20' of amazing vegetable loveliness! After her first year, when she grew too much bok choy (which seems to be easy to do) and zucchini, she has come up with a well balanced mix of lettuce, peas, beans, chard, spinach, zucchini and summer squash, beets, tomatoes, bok choy, sunflowers, radishes, and I'm sure I've forgotten something. Eggplant, maybe? Before dinner, we walk out there and pick what we want. It's like a grocery store. And I have garden envy.

To be fair, there is no shade, so the garden gets sun all the time. The soil is refreshed with compost yearly. The water source is right there and it's easy to tend. The most amazing thing of all is that she doesn't seem to lose anything to critters. And there are almost no bugs. Regardless, I am very impressed at how productive this little patch is.

Since we've been out here, we've had salads, zucchini and summer squash fried in just olive oil, and pasta with chicken sausage and spinach. All amazingly fresh and tasty!

There is no way we can eat all this food!

My sister-in-law arrived this afternoon with this week's farm share. In anticipation, I had to freeze the bunch of bok choy and the bunch of joy choi because we just couldn't eat it all in time (if I hadn't been working so much and missing dinner we might have had a chance). Anyway, this week I received: 1 head of lettuce, 1 bowl of salad mix (again, arugula, mustard greens, mizuna, plus red leaf lettuce), 1 head of cabbage, 1/2 of a radicchio head, a bunch of baby beets, 7 small carrots, 3 small Hakurei turnips, more scallions, more garlic scapes, 2 pattipan squashes, and a large bunch of swiss chard. Leftover from last week, still: scallions and snow peas.

I am amazed at the sheer quantity of food we've received for our investment.

Tonight we're having a nice salad, with shaved romano cheese rather than goat cheese, and I'm cooking the beet greens and the chard together with some of the garlic scapes. This will be served with corn on the cob and leftover lamb shanks which have been simmering all afternoon to make them less leftovery. I'll use the squash, scallions, peas and the rest of the garlic scapes tomorrow, with another salad on the side. I have set aside the beets, hoping to have more in the next few weeks so I can make pickled beets, and I'll have to come up with something for the cabbage. I don't know how we're going to keep up! Especially once my tomatoes start to ripen. Then we'll be drowning in produce.

Tat Soi

Tonight's meal was entirely centered around using the tat soi - what I read about it implied that it didn't last long, so I should use it first. I decided to cook it with the pattipan squashes. First I cut up the garlic scapes and fried them in olive oil for about a minute and then added the cut up squash. This was sprinkled with a lot of maple pepper, my favorite seasoning for squash. At the last minute I added the tat soi and stirred it until it was soft and wilted.This was served with lamb, garnished with the pineapple mint jam, and grilled pineapple. It all was delicious! Followed by the salad course: red leaf lettuce, salad greens, goat cheese, mulberries, more garlic scapes (raw this time), and radish, with a maple balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I don't think I've eaten this much salad since I moved out of my parents' house. But I've been enjoying playing around with the different greens, adding a variety of fruits and cheese in almost every one. (Mango, cilantro, and goat cheese make a great combo, by the way.) Just one month of this farm share has really expanded our menu - and we've been known to eat almost anything.

Bounty in June

Another week, another farm share. More new things for us to try! This week the haul was even bigger; here's our half: 2 pattipan squashes, 1 head of lettuce, 1 large bowl of mixed greens (mustard, spinach, arugula, and mizuna), 5 scallions, 2 large radishes and a small hakurei turnip, 10 baby carrots, 5 garlic scapes, 1 joy choi, 1 bok choi, and 2 tat sois, 1 pint strawberries and 1 cup of snow peas. Wow. And it's just going to be more and more each week!

Add to that the mulberries picked from the tree around the corner (at least 1 pint! what a tree!) and we have the makings for some great salads, stir fries, and snacks. Tonight it's a salad, and I have to run to the store to get some goat cheese and some hamburgers.

Look at all this wonderful stuff (and this is only a little bit of it all)!

I'm Stressed So I'm Canning

I have worked 36.5 hours in the last 3 days, including the overnight last night, and it was rather stressful. By the time I got home I was too stressed to sleep. It's also POURING outside. But, the mulberry tree is almost at its peak, so I put on my not-really-waterproof-anymore raincoat and headed out to the tree. With a lot of patience, a lot of strange looks from drivers going by, and not minding the rain, I ended up with almost a full quart of mulberries! We've never gotten that many at once before!

"Why do you always can the fruit and not let us have any?"

"Well, there are plenty more berries on the tree that have yet to get ripe - we can go back."

"Oh, OK!"

Today I also tried something new. I had picked up a box of this pectin at Whole Foods a few months ago, but wasn't sure about using it. It requires making a calcium solution and adding it to the fruit which then activates the pectin. Because it's titratable, it's perfect for times when you don't have enough fruit for a full batch. In this case I had 2 cups of crushed mulberries, to which I added 2 T. of lime juice, 1 tsp. of the calcium mixture, 1 cup of sugar and 1 tsp. of the pectin. Worked out great, and I ended up with 1 half-pint jar and 1 12-oz jar of jam. After processing for 10 minutes and hearing them "pop!" I went and took a nap, finally.

This Week on the Farm

Lettuce, salad greens (arugula, spinach, etc.), radishes, more of the Hakurei turnips, strawberries, peas, scallions, bok choi, beet greens, cilantro...

Beet greens?

I'd always assumed that beet greens were there so you could get the beet out of the ground. I never thought you could actually eat them. Hmmm.

Tonight for dinner we had the beet greens. I found this simple recipe and got started. But what to do with the little tiny beets that came with the greens? I trimmed them, put them in boiling water for a few minutes, and fried them with the greens. The greens were sweeter than a lot of the other greens we've tried in the past. I might even seek these out in the store (or, at least, not throw them into the compost heap when I'm pickling beets this summer)! We also ate the salad greens with the snap peas, turnips, radishes, some mulberries we picked from the tree around the corner, carrots, cukes, and goat cheese. Kids were not so interested but the grown ups had 2 helpings each.

STRAWBERRIES!

When we woke up this morning, it was pouring. Drat! This was the day I'd planned to go strawberry picking and get some stuff put up. Well, fortunately, the rain mostly stopped and I decided to go anyway. It was a great thing - there was no one there (for a while, I was the only person in the field) and the strawberries were plentiful. I filled an entire flat in less than 45 minutes and in only half of one row. I didn't even need to wear the rain pants and hat!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I needed to make a double batch of strawberry jam and some strawberry lemonade concentrate. Unfortunately, my canner didn't hold enough jars for me to make a double batch in one fell swoop, so I had to make 2 single batches. Fortunately, jam goes quick: wash, crush, measure, boil, add pectin, put in the jars. Each batch made 4.5 pints so I have LOTS of jam this time.

On to the strawberry lemonade. A comment from beadgirl made me pay more attention to how much it made. Using the recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, I made a double batch and ended up with 5 quarts and a little bit more. According to the book, I should have gotten 7 quarts, but as beadgirl had mentioned, the yield seems to be off. This pretty much fits with my experience of last year, when I ended up with 4 quarts and a lot that we drank right away with 2 batches. What I should have done is use the larger pot - this was one of those times when I take unnecessary risks:

But it was really pretty when I added the lemon juice - it formed a yin-yang of pink and yellow that disappeared before I could get my camera going.

Ah, yes, the camera. I'm using my iPhone because for some reason, our little Elph is having lens issues. I think someone may have dropped it one too many times? Regardless, I'm exhausted, and I still have a lot of strawberries to go. Imagine how it was last year when I had 2 flats full!