(CSA Newsletter: Week 3)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Brussels sprouts — These are the last of the Brussels sprouts that survived the cold weather. We picked individual sprouts to make sure you got good ones (since many on each stalk were damaged). To prepare, we recommend trimming and soaking in cold water before cooking (for a final cleaning). Remove any discolored leaves (which usually fall off during trimming). We love to roast halved Brussels with garlic until they are slightly browned and tender all the way through.
Castelfranco — More of this delicious winter salad green.
Collard greens — Collards are one of our hardiest cooking greens. They always amaze us with their ability to make it through almost anything and then grow new beautiful lush leaves in mid-winter. You can prepare collards as you would kale or mustard greens: chop and sauté in oil/butter with onions, garlic or leeks.
Rutabaga — Rutabaga often look ugly on the outside but contain a lovely creamy flesh inside. You can cut rutabaga into strips or small cubes and add to salads raw, or prepare as you might any other root vegetable: add to soups, roast, or boil and mash with butter.
Sweet potatoes — We experimented with storing sweet potatoes for longer this year, and so far we’re very pleased with the results! The sweet potatoes have stored beautifully with very little work, and we’re super excited to be eating this treat in February! We always prepare our sweet potatoes the same way: chopped into bite-sized cubes and then roasted until soft. (Trick: to get your roasted sweet potatoes crispy on the outside, don’t stir when you pull them out of the oven the final time. Let them sit on the pan for several minutes, and they will crisp up while you finish the rest of your meal preparations.)
Leeks
Onions
Garlic
After finishing the CSA harvest last week, we focused our energy on one big task: picking up more trees and planting our second small fruit orchard!
Last winter at this time, we put in our first small orchard of apple, pear, and plum trees. We were so excited to be started on the path to fruit (talk about delayed gratification!), but we realized belatedly that we wished our orchard was closer to our home instead of at the other end of the field. We love trees of all kinds and wanted to be in closer daily proximity to the orchard in all seasons.
Solution? Plant another orchard! Which we did over two days last week. So, now we have two small orchards (210 trees total), each filling in an awkward spot in our field that wouldn’t be terribly conducive to row crop production. Permanent trees seem like a good solution for these little areas on the farm, and we can’t wait to watch the trees grow and grow (and, eventually, produce fruit for us and our community of eaters).
The tree planting definitely has us thinking of summer … juicy plums and crisp apples seem so far away, both in terms of the trees’ production and the seasons themselves. Summer will arrive eventually, and in the meantime we’re excited to go on our annual retreat to the Breitenbush hot springs — the highlight of our winter!
We’ll see you in two weeks … while we’re gone, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Reminder! Next week, February 23, there will be NO CSA harvest or pick-up (that week was not included in your CSA price). We are taking the week off to attend an annual farmer retreat at Breitenbush Hot Springs. Hoorah! We’ll see you again in two weeks!
