What’s In The Box with Recipe Suggestions
White Cauliflower: Store cauliflower in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it. Prior to using, trim away the outer wrapper leaves which protect the white crown inside. Simply cook it according to your favorite method, toss it with a little butter, salt, pepper and maybe a squeeze of lemon juice.
Indian Coconut Butter Cauliflower
Broccoli: You can eat the entire plant…leaves, stem and florets! Just give it a quick sauté in butter or oil along with garlic scapes or scallions. Drizzle with a little soy sauce or sprinkle with your favorite cheese and you just created a tasty vegetable dish in less than 10 minutes!
Tiara Cabbage: This unique cabbage is intended for eating raw as its leaves are tender! Read more about sweetheart salad cabbage in this week’s vegetable feature article.
Grilled Cabbage Wedges with Spicy Lime Dressing
Fennel: This is the long, slender vegetable with a white bulb and soft, feathery stalks. Take a moment to read last week’s vegetable feature for more information about this unique vegetable.
Caramelized Fennel and Apple Tart
Red Beets: Both the green tops and roots are edible. Remove the green tops and store them separate from the root. Store roots and greens in the crisper drawer.
Roast Beet and Kale Salad with Maple Candied Nuts
Sugar Ann Snap Peas: These peas have an edible pod. Simply remove the string along the top before you eat them. They are excellent when eaten raw, quickly sautéed or stir-fried!
15 Minute Spicy Shrimp and Snap Pea Stir-Fry
Garlic Scapes: This will be our last week for garlic scapes. If you would like to preserve them for use during the winter, consider making Pickled Garlic Scapes.
Roasted Garlic Scapes with Sea Salt
Green Scallions: If you’re looking for a super simple vegetable side dish, sauté peas with thinly sliced scallions. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s so delicious!
Soy Sauce-Marinated Flank Steak with Scallions
Green and/or Silver Slicer Cucumbers: While we most often eat cucumbers raw, they can also be grilled such as in this simple recipe for Grilled cucumbers with Feta.
Samin Nosrat’s Vietnamese Cucumber Salad
Green and/or Italian and/or Yellow Scallopini Squash: Use this week’s zucchini to make a simple Italian pasta dish or in a recipe for fudgy brownies!
Healthy Chocolate Zucchini Brownies
Garlic Shrimp and Zucchini Wrap
Lacinato Kale: This variety of kale is also referred to in recipes as Tuscan or Dino Kale. Use it to make a raw kale salad or use it in a Summer Minestrone Soup along with some of this week’s zucchini!
Lacinato Kale Caesar Salad
Curried Lentils with Kale and Coconut Milk
Red Leaf or Green Romaine Lettuce: Cut the base of the lettuce to separate the leaves and wash vigorously in a sink of cold water before using. For optimal storage, be sure to dry the leaves before storing in the refrigerator.
Salt-Roasted Beets with Goat Cheese & Toasted Walnuts
Butter Lettuce and Herb Salad (with Fennel & Scallions)
Vegetable Feature: Tiara Cabbage
This year we have two varieties of salad cabbage, Tiara and Sweetheart. Tiara is a round cabbage, and sweetheart cabbage forms a pointy head. Both are smaller varieties typically only weighing about 1¼ to 2 pounds on average. These varieties are intended to be grown as an early-season cabbage and are known as “salad cabbage” because the leaves are tender enough to be eaten raw in salads. Another reason we grow this variety for summer harvest is that it gives us another option for a “salad green” during early summer when lettuce is more difficult to grow.
There are a lot of different ways you can prepare salad cabbage. We recommend slicing it thinly or shredding it for use in vegetable slaws or other raw salads. You may use the leaves as a wrap in place of tortillas or bread. If you choose to cook it, we recommend a quick cooking method such as stir-frying or grilling and be careful not to overcook it! Store salad cabbage loosely wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it. Lightly rinse the outer leaves before using them. If you don’t use the entire cabbage for one preparation, wrap the remaining portion of cabbage and store it in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it. While salad cabbage can vary in size, an average cabbage typically yields 5-7 cups when shredded.
Short & Sweet Weekly Farm Update
We passed! Tuesday, we had our Organic Certification, and we passed with flying colors! Richard spent most of the day with Dan, our inspector. Dan had a few surprise questions for us, and like the well-oiled machine we are, we were able to answer and show our paperwork too! Mellissa was Richard’s go to person, and she knocked it out of the park by being ‘Johnny on the Spot (Richard’s words)’ to get what was needed. With the support of Sedona and Kelly, on the paperwork side and Rafael and Alvaro helping out in the fields, Dan was able to get all his questions answered and make the determination before the end of the day, Thank you Dan! Next week we move on to our Food Safety Inspection!
On to the field report, we struggled to get our first cutting of hay baled between the rain showers, but Alejandro is ready in the next day or two for that baling. Richard and Rafael are constantly watching the fields and while you will see peas and beets in the week’s share box, they are estimating that you will start to see green/yellow beans in your CSA box next week! After that, we will see new potatoes, carrots, basil and even tomatillos. The reports from the eggplant and pepper fields are that the plants look great and both are starting to flower. A few more weeks after that we should start to see those too! Today we are cleaning out another spot in the greenhouse, transplanting the latest Dandelion plants. All that to say, we will be seeing a lot more vegetables soon!
