Looking to summer

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 5)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

  • Tatsoi — A new Asian cooking/fresh eating green, in the same wider family as bok choy. Add the fresh leaves to salads or chop and stir fry with onions, ginger, and soy sauce. For a larger delicious stir-fry blend, cook tatsoi, bok choy and turnip greens and serve over rice or noodles.
  • Dinosaur kale — Kale of a different lineage from last week’s Red Russian variety … ‘dinosaur’ kale — as it is sometimes called — is also known as ‘Black Palm,’ ‘Lacinato,’ ‘Cavolo Nero,’ and ‘Italian.’ We ‘braise’ or stir-fry it until wilted with onions. Great for breakfast in a frittata or as side dish with dinner.
  • Purple top turnips — This week’s turnips are the more traditional variety, known by its distinctive purple shoulders. While they have a more typical ‘turnip’ flavor than the white turnips, you can continue to enjoy these raw. (When cooked, they turn slightly bitter, so we’d only recommend that route for the die-hard turnips fans.) Also, the greens are large and delicious — wash, chop and cook with your bok choy or tatsoi for a tasty blend of flavors.
  • Peas
  • Broccoli
  • Bok choy
  • Salad mix
  • Spring sweet onion
  • Happy summer! Last Thursday was officially the longest day of the year, putting us now truly in the summer season.

    And, amazingly, the weather is playing the part. We’ve enjoyed the long run of dry, warm days we’re experiencing right now. The slough is so far continuing to supply a steady, reliable source of water, and we’re seeing some fabulously overdue growth in the fields. The summer squash are blooming, carrots are sizing up, and tomatoes are setting fruit.

    To help further summer progress along, we finally put up our ‘field house’ (a large portable hoop house) over half of our tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Normally we construct the field house before we plant, but this year we were delayed by the fabrication of new anchors. The anchors themselves were done in time for planting, but then they waited to be galvanized for several weeks, during which time our plants valiantly grew through one of the coldest springs in recent record.

    Fortunately, we have the anchors now and are glad to have the house up — the tomatoes and peppers look happy enough to receive a little extra heat, especially overnight when the lows continue to drop into the 50s.

    In similar farm news, we focused on maintaining many of our plantings this weekend: weeding and tending important crops such as our onions and winter squash. They’re all looking great now, which is very exciting and relieving after a touch-and-go spring.

    We spent some time off the farm this weekend too, as we presented on fall and winter vegetable gardening at the McMinnville Public Library. The turnout and enthusiasm was great — we hope that many of the attendees feel inspired to plant some kale this fall for winter eating.

    We’re looking forward to a few upcoming weeks with no big special events, just normal summer routines and work. Although fun, events like the recent presentation and open house, can easily distract us from the tasks at hand and then create unnecessary stress (as well as joy).

    So, we’ll be planting, weeding, and harvesting this early summer. And, maybe it will be hot enough sometime soon for us to start making our regular trips to the river.

    As you ease into your summer routine, we hope you have fun experimenting with different recipes and veggies preparations. We’ve included several new recipes with this newsletter for you to try out this week. Enjoy the vegetables!

    Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

    ~ ~ ~

    Another food book for your summer reading list!

    I picked up a great book while we were at the library this weekend — Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. Some of you may be familiar with their previous book, Material World: A Global Family Portrait, in which they photographed families around the world in front of their homes with every single possession they owned. You can imagine what a startling contrast those photographs present, and this newer book in the series follows a similar contrast-filled theme.

    In Hungry Planet, Menzel and D’Aluisio again interview and photograph families from around the world, but this time they focus on food and photograph each family posed with one week’s worth of their food.

    The photographs are fascinating on so many levels. As a reader, I was first drawn in by the pure voyeuristic nature of seeing other family’s diets on display. But on further observation, the photographs reveal so much about the global food system, poverty, hunger, affluence, culture retention, culture loss, family structures, and more.

    A few items that stood out to me: the relative lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in the three American families’ diets (while families in ‘developing’ nations stood behind literal piles of produce); the presence of recognizable food brands and labels in almost every single photograph (especially cold cereals); and finally simply the sheer volume of food in the developed nations’ diets.

    This is probably one of the most engrossing photograph books I’ve looked at in years — the images and the text both are loaded with so much content that I spent several minutes looking at each page and am sure I missed things. This is a book I could read over and over again. Highly recommended for readers of all ages.

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    One Response to Looking to summer

    1. rich says:

      Hungry planet is an amazing book…reminds me, I need to check it out again when you’re done with it!

      Folks can check out our blurb on it here
      http://www.mossbackfarm.com/archive/000199.html
      where there’s links to pictures and an NPR story on the book

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