The Adamah Blog

West Hartford CSA- Final Week November 17th!

Being a member of a CSA necessarily teaches us how to experiment with new foods, cook seasonally and eat healthier. In bountiful years, this connection to a particular piece of land teaches us gratitude for the sun, rain, soil, farm workers, and the generosity of natural cycles. This year, we have also learned harder lessons about the fragility of our food source and the smallness of our efforts in the face of big storms.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you as CSA members for sticking with us so graciously. We would have loved a fall full of potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, pumpkins, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and beets. Instead we all learned to eat loads and loads of greens each week since they were the crops we were able to fill in the shares with. There is something very significant about your choice to eat with the true tides of the land and in the case of our kale-heavy season, perhaps our bodies are that much more grateful for the extra vitamins!

Harvest Notes – Week 23 November 17^th

Bok Choi These small heads are especially delicious after the frost.

Totsoi This is another Asian green like Bok Choi and you can use it the same way. Try stir-frying it or chopping it into this slices and marinating it for raw salads.

Salad Mix Adamah fellow Hana paused from harvesting salad mix this morning and when I looked up from my row she had a half eaten frilly green in one hand and announced, “Woah!” “What?” I asked concerned. “That is ridiculously awesome.” She then proceeded to tell me all the ways that our salad mix has changed her life. “I had no idea there could be so much complexity to salad greens. I want to know what each one is so I can grow them. I used to think that if I grew a garden, I would grow tomatoes or something but now I know that I would grow a gazillion different varieties of salad green.” Hana particularly recommends the golden frills mustard green that is in your mix on a chedder cheese sandwich.

Braising Mix Another gourmet mix of cooking greens. You can braise them, saute them, stir-fry them, steam them, chop them up for soup… the possibilities are endless and the greens are deliciously frost sweetened. In addition to the brassica greens komatsuna, broccoli raab, and turnip greens we’ve added some small beet greens to mix up the flavor.

Cilantro We are amazed at how well this cilantro grew back considering how cold its been! While harvesting, we discussed what we use cilantro for. Garth prefers it in curry but will put it to other uses. Sally will use it in anything including red sauce for pasta. Yael is one of those people who is genetically predisposed against cilantro so she was struggling just to harvest it. Personally, I can’t wait to put it in a huge pot of beans.

Kale or Collards I hope you won’t miss this kale/collard abundance too much after the CSA ends! These plants get the gold star for production and we hope you’ve learned to love it as much as we do. This stuff is particularly gourmet now that it has frosted a few times.

Spinach Delicious raw or cooked, this stuff will make muscly sailors of us all.

Onions The last of our onion crop!

Garlic And the last of our garlic crop!

Apples The Berenstain Bears were the first to teach me that you can’t judge an apple by its outside but we have all learned that lesson in a new way this season. If you haven’t seen the video I’m talking about, check it out below especially from 1:26 seconds to 2:05 seconds.

Adamah fellow Chavi picking apples for the CSA

Adamah fellows writing by the lake here at Isabella Freedman

West Hartford CSA Harvest Notes-Week 22 November 10

Next week is the last delivery and we will be in West Hartford to celebrate. Consider bringing your family and lingering at the pick-up a while. We will do kraut-making demos, veggie-oil truck fueling, cider pressing and we can swap stories with you about how we grew the food and how you cooked it!

We will send you an electronic survey of our own in the next week. It will be shorter than the Hazon survey and will help us plan which crops to plant next year. When you receive it electronically, please take the time to fill it out as it will help us dramatically in our planning. Your feedback is the most important information we need to move forward.

This week we are grateful not to have had to shovel snow off our crops. We hope you all have power back and are returning to a more normal routine. The plants are troopers and they keep on giving…

Braising Mix We are really excited about this mix of cooking greens. You can braise them, saute them, stir-fry them, steam them, chop them up for soup… the possibilities are endless and the greens are deliciously frost sweetened. This is a combination of four brassica greens- turnip greens, komatsuna, broccoli raab and bok choi that go well together.

Mint A little something to flavor your hot cocoa, curry, tea or yogurt.

Popcorn Yes, we grew our own popcorn! It has been drying on our drying racks since we harvested it from Beebe in September. Popcorn has to get really dry before it will pop well and I tested it at home the other night– perfect pops! If you aren’t used to popcorn on the cob here are a few tips. First, you’ll need to separate the kernals from the ear into a bowl by applying relatively light pressure. Next, heat up the oil of your choice in a big pot that has a lid. I put just two kernals in at first and once they pop then I know the oil is hot enough and I put the rest of the kernals in. Close the lid tight and swish the kernals around a bit to mix them with the oil.  Don’t open it until there are two to three seconds between audible pops. Remove from heat and enjoy!

Collards Our friend Mark, who often volunteers here on the farm, told me that he usually doesn’t like collard greens- an inconvenient truth since I gave him a couple of collard plants for his garden at the beginning of the season. Now that the summer crops from his garden are finished he is confronting the collard greens full on. He created a recipe in which he steamed the greens whole, spread peanut butter on the inside of the leaves and then stuffed them with sushi rice seasoned with tamari and rolled them up like nori. While some of you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of cooking greens a CSA involves, we promise that they are really really good for you and extremely versatile once you get used to tossing a little bit into everything.

Salad Mix We’d love to hear what different salad dressing recipes folks have been using.

Onions These guys keep on storing well for us!

Garlic We planted our garlic this week! Once the snow melted off the beds we had designated for garlic we were able to put this extremely satisfying, fall-planted crop in the field. They will have a bit of time to establish roots before winter hits and then lay dormant until early spring at which point they’ll send up the first green sprouts of our 2012 fields.

Apples You’ve had a chance to try a number of different tasty local varieties. We’ve been making lots of apple jam with these apples which you can find next week at our West Hartford market. We hope you’ve been experimenting yourselves with jams or crisps or other tasty autumn apple treats. Remember, the funny markings on the skin of the apples is totally harmless and good proof that they have not been sprayed with pesticides.

Adamah Fellows fill the box truck that delivers your veggies each week with recycled vegetable oil- a more ecological alternative to fossil fuel.  Next week’s pick-up in West Hartford will afford you all an opportunity to learn how the system works and fill up with grease.

This picture was taken a few weeks ago when Adamah fellow Emma chopped scallions for our 2011 kimchi.  All the ingredients sat together in a pickling barrel until today, Yom Kimchi, when we uncorked our barrels and packed the delicious Korean style pickle. Try some at next Thursday’s CSA pick-up/market/celebration.  You will also get to try your hand at lacto-fermentation next week during our kraut demos.