Happy Holidays!

(CSA Newsletter: Week 45)

Meet this week’s vegetables:


  • Swiss chard — One of my favorite ways to eat chard in winter is in soup! I make a brothy soup with chopped root veggies and then add chopped chard toward the end and let it wilt thoroughly. The texture reminds me vaguely of seaweed in miso soup (one of my favorite comfort foods), but the flavor jives beautifully with other winter veggies (carrots, potatoes, celeriac, etc.).
  • Radicchio OR castelfranco — Your choice between these two hardy winter salad greens. Both are delicious as salad, and both benefit from being tossed with the dressing and allowed to slightly wilt. To beef up your salad, try adding finely chopped cabbage as well. We love a slightly sweet creamy dressing: maybe yogurt, mayo, oil, honey and salt and pepper.
  • Brussels sprouts OR cabbage — Once again, your choice between a large brassica head or a very little brassica head!
  • Fennel bulb — If you haven’t made friends with fennel yet in 2010, here is one last opportunity! Try one of the recipes in this week’s newsletter!
  • Sweet potatoes — Comfort food to enjoy during the dark days!
  • Winter squash — While we’re speaking of comfort foods and soups, I should mention making squash soup. You can start with already roasted squash (add cubed to broth and simmer for a few minutes and then blend); or you can cube raw squash and cook it in a broth and then blend. We use both methods depending on whether on how much time we have and how much we feel like chopping (roasting takes longer but requires less hard chopping). Soup is also a great use for leftover roasted squash from a prior meal.
  • Leeks
  • Garlic

This is it — the final pick-up of our fifth CSA season! It’s been quite the year, significantly different primarily because of the presence of Rusty in our life and on the farm. As anyone with a young child would understand, we’re fairly tired as we approach the end of 2010. We always look forward to our winter break, but this year we feel especially in need of it. Our life is full of deferred projects and tasks that we look forward to working on during our four weeks off.

We’ll be thinking of all of you during the holidays — it’s lovely to have a break during this, the darkest time of year. We look forward to the returning of light as we enter 2011 (which will then be paired with the return of veggies in mid-January!).

In the meantime, enjoy the last of 2010’s vegetables!!!!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

Turn-of-the-year reminders

  • We’re done! This week is the last 2010 CSA pick-up!
  • Final 2010 payments are due now! If you’re unsure of your remaining balance, email me: farm(at)oakhillorganics(dot)org. You can mail us remaining payments: Oakhill Organics, P.O. Box 1698, McMinnville, OR 97128.
  • Have you signed up for 2011 yet? If so, you should have already received or will soon receive a printed invoice from us with more details. If you think you have signed up—but have not received an invoice within a week—please contact us!
  • The 2011 season begins again on Tuesday, January 18, 3:30-6:30. This is two weeks earlier than our prior start dates! See you then!

For the solstice, enjoy these special winter poems!

To Know the Dark
Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Winter
Mary Oliver

And the waves
gush pearls
from their snowy throats
as they come
leaping
over the moss-green,
black-green,
glass-green roughage—
as they crumble
on the incline
scattering
whatever they carry
in their invisible
and motherly
hands:
stones,
seaweed,
mussels
icy and plump
with waled shells,
waiting
for the gatherers
who come flying
on their long white wings—
who comes walking,
who comes muttering:
thank you,
old dainties,
dark wreckage,
coins of the sea
in my pockets
and plenty for the gulls
and the wind is still pounding
and the sea still streaming in like a mother wild with gifts—
in this world I am as rich
as I need to be.

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One Response to Happy Holidays!

  1. The vegetables in your photograph look really good and make me envious as for the last few weeks I have not been able to get to harvest my crops due to the unusual weather we have had here in the UK. I wish you well for you winter break and all good wishes for 2011 growing season.

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