Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Cabbage — Have you made sauerkraut yet this winter? Maybe it’s time! See the ‘recipe’ in this week’s newsletter.
- Sweet potatoes — Roasted sweet potatoes seem to go with anything. Lately we’ve started just cooking different things and piling them together: rice topped with roasted sweet potatoes topped with sautéed cabbage and leeks topped with sauerkraut topped with crumbled goat cheese. I don’t know what to call that dish, but it’s a yummy end of winter combination!
- Parsnips
- Celery root
- Carrots OR potatoes
- Popcorn
- Leeks — We have never eaten so many leeks in our house as over the last two weeks! We’ve always been leek fans, but often we find it easier to grab an onion from dry storage if we don’t leeks already harvested in the cooler. Now that we’re pretty much out of onions, we’re being forced to eat more leeks, and we have fallen in love with leeks all over again. They’re great every way: in soups, roasted, as the allium flavor in a sautéed vegetable dish, mixed with cooked grains, etc.
Garlic
Coming up with this week’s veggie list was more challenging than usual. We have plenty of vegetables, but they’re of the same types we’ve been giving out all winter. Usually right about now, things start changing — increasing day length and warmer weather stimulate new growth in the field and we get to add fun different greens to the shares.
This year, however, the cold, wet weather continues to linger, and the fields are stuck in ‘stand by’ mode. We’re trying not to get nervous, because every spring is unpredictable, colder and wetter than we ever expect, and a bit frustrating. Even the springs that turn out to be warmer or drier than average bring moments when we wonder if we’ll be able to plant, if the crops will grow, if it will ever be summer again. Of course, the warmer springs bring fewer of such moments, but we have doubts at times anyway.
Over the last five years of growing for our CSA, we have come to trust the process more and more. Our role in farming is obviously significant — we have to be organized and thoughtful about how and when we do our work. Needless to say, the crops won’t grow without our involvement!
However, our contributions are only a small piece of the growth puzzle. We sow, water, weed, and wait for the sun and the soil to work their magic on our plants. It takes a level of faith to step back and trust that we will in fact be harvesting crops — especially in the moments when the cold has slowed growth down significantly and the forecast calls for rain, rain, and more rain. Ah, Oregon springs.
So, we apologize if the veggies look redundant this week. This is the end of winter, and we are at the cusp of change. But in the meantime, take this opportunity to get even more creative than before. Try a brand-new cabbage recipe. (Have you made sauerkraut before? This week’s cabbage is perfect for kraut!)
Or, try on a new perspective and make a point to cherish the flavors who will surely soon be leaving our plates until next fall. It is so easy to find the repetition of winter ‘dull,’ but it is precisely at that moment of ‘doneness’ that nature typically provides a break.
We’re getting there soon, just not as quickly as we farmers would hope! We’re getting antsy to plant and see things burst with growth again! It’s what we love, and after a winter of rest, we’re ready to go forward with new energy, new help on the farm, and a new season full of potential!
In the meantime, enjoy this week’s winter vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Goodbye & hello!
This week represented a big change on the farm. Last Tuesday, we said good-bye to our former employee Jeff, who is now working full-time on he and his wife’s farm venture, Pitchfork & Crow. We are very excited for Jeff and Carri as they make this big step in their farm’s journey, but we will miss his presence on our farm. It was a great year!
Wednesday morning we welcomed our two new employees, Jesse and Emily, who will be working with us full-time this year (and possibly future years as well!). They will be trading off helping at pick-up, so you’ll get to meet each of them soon. We’re very excited about the fresh energy they’re bringing to our fields as the winter seems to drag on and on and on.
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Reminder for Newberg/Dundee folks!
Do you want to switch to the Newberg pick-up beginning in June? Remember to fill out a sign-up form in the brochure so that we know to save a place for you and adjust your balance! You can also find the sign-up on our website.
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Food, Inc. — A movie worth watching
Yes, I am referring to the 2008 movie, Food, Inc. Casey and I are waaaaaaaay behind on anything related to the world of movies and television. We finally watched this movie over the weekend, making it the first movie we’d watched since last May (at all — in home or in the theater). Of course, in that same time, we’ve devoured dozens of books. So, I guess screens just aren’t our thing.
Anyhow, given the topic, we figured we should check this movie out. It was more or less what I expected: a movie version of the content found in books we’d already read (namely Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen). The content overlapped significantly, along with many of the key persons (including of course farmer Joel Salatin).
What I was not expecting was the emotional power of seeing the content illustrated with moving pictures (yes, welcome to the 20th century, Katie — moving pictures are powerful!). It’s one thing to read about feedlots and slaughterhouses — it’s quite another thing to see cows standing in their own manure and then being shoved around as they stumble to their deaths.
Likewise, it was astonishing to watch ‘food’ being processed in vast factories — chickens dangling from hooks on zooming conveyer belts (looking disturbingly like naked babies), workers literally running (with knives in their hands) to make the same cut over and over again on quickly moving pig carcasses, USDA ‘inspectors’ stamping finished meat at a pace that makes the concept of ‘inspection’ laughable …
Anyhow, I don’t need to go into all the details here, since perhaps many of you have already seen the movie and the rest of you can easily rent it. I certainly don’t think Food, Inc.is the ‘end-all-be-all’ of commentaries on our food system, but the footage itself is worth seeing. Any of us who eat modern food should at least have a peek at where it is coming from so we can then decide whether we feel good about our choices.
