Clear Brook Farm CSA Week 3

Eric and I signed up for Clear Brook Farm’s 10-week winter CSA again this year, and we’re heading into week three of our farm share. 

Every Wednesday, Clear Brook Farm sends an e-mail to all CSA members listing everything they’ll get in their share that week.  It’s a courteous gesture designed to help us plan our meals–and the rest of our grocery lists–for the following week.  I’m sure it’s also intended to generate excitement for that week’s share. I know I look forward to receiving these newsletters in my inbox every week and to finding out what awesome organic veggies I’ll get to cook with. 

This year, Clear Brook Farm’s newsletters contain recipes for some of the produce in each week’s share.  I’m glad they’re doing this because last year I really didn’t know what to do with some of the veggies I had never heard of, such as romanesco and celeriac, and I never made the time to search for recipes for those items online.  This week’s newsletter contains recipes for roasted root vegetables, celeriac root bisque, beet and celeriac salad, and sweet and sour carrots.  As you might have guessed from those recipes, this weeks’ share contains celeriac and carrots, in addition to butternut squash, fennel, spinach, brocoli, lettuce, scallions and onions. 

I saved two carrots from the first week’s farm share, so I think I’ll make my favorite carrot ginger soup–the recipe comes courtesy of The Silver Palate cookbook via my friend Alice Stokes.  Maybe I’ll try that celeriac root bisque, too.  The recipe didn’t excite me at first, but it did elicit a Homer Simpson-esque “oooh!” from Eric.  (What the heck else am I going to do with celeriac?) I’ll definitely make roasted root vegetables, too. 

What would you make with this week’s farm share?

Update on the Clear Brook Farm CSA

When I went to Clear Brook Farm on my lunch break on Thursday, I asked about my status on the farm’s waiting list for a share in its CSA.  Good thing I did because Clear Brook had space for me.  I am now officially off the waiting list and a winter shareholder!  I forked over 300 bucks (thank g-d I had gotten paid the day before), and the deal was done.  I look forward to awesome Clear Brook veggies from mid-October through mid-December.  It’ll be so great to just pick up my bag of veggies on the weekend and not have to pay a dime since I already paid for my share.

Clear Brook Farm CSA

Clear Brook Farm, my local organic farm stand in Shaftsbury, Vermont, is making its first foray into community supported agriculture (CSA) this fall. Andrew Knafel, Clear Book’s founder and head farmer dude, told me that he decided to offer the CSA this year so that he could keep some of his farm hands on his payroll into the winter.  The farm shares Clear Brook is offering run for 10 weeks, from roughly mid-October (when Clear Brook Farm normally closes–always a very sad day for me) through mid-December.  I’m on a waiting list for a farm share. I hope I make the cut!

Clear Brook Farm is offering two different kinds of shares.  The basic offering (yours for $300) consists of veggies Clear Brook can grow in its greenhouse along with hardier winter stuff, like potatoes.  The gourmand offering (as I like to call it) consists of Clear Brook’s produce as well as veggies from other local farms, along with local cheeses, breads and when available, meats. The gourmand offering costs $500.

I would have liked to have signed up for the gourmand offering (mmmm…local cheese…mmmm), but at roughly $50 a week, it’s more than I can afford. So I opted for the basic, proletariat offering.  As it is, I spend an average of $25 to $30 a week at Clear Brook on fruit and veggies (the tab runs closer to $40 when I buy bacon, smoked turkey, mozzarella cheese and hummus) so I don’t feel like I’m getting cheated by spending $30 a week for a share. Plus, I have a feeling I’ll get way more veggies in my weekly farm share than I’d get buying stuff on my own.  I told Eric that he’s going to have to start eating his vegetables.  (He doesn’t eat kale and collard greens the way I do.)

I hope I can get in on a share. Clear Brook offered 100 shares this year, and I hear they got snatched up pretty fast. I hope the CSA program goes well for them so that they can offer it again next year.

Clear Brook Farm Produce Stand to Open June 13

I ran out to Clear Brook Farm at lunch today in search of plum tomatoes for the gazpacho I’m planning to make for dinner tonight.  I thought for sure Clear Brook had opened its produce stand last weekend, while my summer cold rendered me bed-ridden.  The farm stand usually opens at the beginning of June.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a sign that said the produce stand would open this Friday and that I hadn’t missed the opening day (it’s something I look forward to every year), but alas, I didn’t get my tomatoes.

Anyone have a recipe for gazpacho that calls for canned tomatoes?  I was planning to follow the gazpacho recipe in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.  That cookbook has not once failed me.

Herb Garden

I don’t have much of a green thumb, but I’ve always wanted to cultivate a lush, hardy herb garden.

Each week my grocery list features a pot pourri of fresh herbs that I need for the dinners I’m planning to prepare: Cilantro for the fish tacos, basil for the tomato sauce, dill for the potato salad and parsley for the tabbouleh. Fresh herbs elevate prosaic foods from hum-drum to holy-cow-this-is-good! Scrambled eggs taste so much more lively when they’re spiked with freshly chopped chives, thyme and savory.  Canned tuna gets transformed from cat food to culinary delight when I add a bunch of chopped dill (not to mention some diced red onion and my mom’s secret ingredient).  And my home-made ranch dressing, flecked with pieces of parsley, brightens up the sorriest, soggiest greens.

Of course, all this herbal goodness doesn’t come cheap.  I easily spend an average of $10 on fresh herbs each week at the grocery store.  So when I charged $30 worth of potted herbs on my credit card this weekend at Clear Brook Farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, I didn’t feel so guilty about spending money on myself.  I considered the purchase a short-term investment in my foodie future.

I just hope the investment, which also consisted of $20 worth of potting soil and a $20 cedar barrel, pays off.  You see, I’m not very good at gardening.  I either over-water plants and they drown, or I neglect to water them and they shrivel up like mummies’ fingers. I plant them too close together, or in places where they get too much or too little sun.  Some people make gardening look so easy, but I just can’t get it right.

We’ll see how well my herb garden fares this summer.  Last summer I planted potted basil, but most of it got eaten by some kind of insect before I could harvest it for pesto and Caprese salads.

This summer’s herb garden got off to an inauspicious start on Sunday when I began planting some of the dill I had bought that day.  After two difficult attempts to remove the dill from the plastic container in which it had grown from seed—which resulted in the disintegration of all the potting soil—I thought to myself, Hey, maybe these herbs need to grow more before I plant them in the whiskey barrel? I left the rest of the dill in the plastic container.  I also didn’t dare touch the basil or the cilantro, both of which looked to small and delicate to transplant.  I did plant the parsley, thyme, chives and mint.

If you have tips on how to cultivate a prolific herb garden with a minimum of Miracle-Gro, please let me know!

Dandelion Greens

I decided to pick some dandelion greens this evening. I’ve never eaten them before, and I wanted to try them. See what the fuss was about. I quickly filled the basket from my salad spinner with bunches of the long, narrow scalloped leaves that I plucked from the unkempt flower beds in my front yard.

If you’ve never picked dandelion greens before and decide to do so, I caution against picking ones that grow between sidewalk cracks or along sidewalks, as those are likely to have been peed on by a dog. I do recommend running lots of cold water over the dandelion greens you do pick, giving the wet leaves a good twirl in your salad spinner, rinsing the bowl of your salad spinner between twirls, and then repeating that process two or three times to make sure you get all of the dirt off the greens. I couldn’t get over the amount of muddy water that collected in my salad spinner after my first whirl.

I sampled a leaf while I was wrapping them up in a damp paper towel to store in my fridge. The flavor was mild at first, perhaps a bit citrusy, but as my teeth macerated the leaf, the taste grew increasingly, powerfully bitter. “Blech,” I said.

It’s a funny thing, eating weeds.

Do you like dandelion greens? How do you eat them? I, for one, am going to need a lot of Cheez Whiz to get these greens down.