What’s In The Box with Recipe Suggestions
Broccoli: Take advantage of our warm fall days and enjoy a meal on the deck or patio! Pair the salad suggestion with barbecued ribs, burgers or grilled chicken!
Broccoli Salad with Bacon & a Creamy Dressing
Orange Carrots: Carrots can be the star of the show, or they can be a subtle contributor to a dish in the background. Adding diced carrots to soups and sauces adds nutrition along with sweetness.
Moroccan Carrot Salad with Roasted Lemon and Parsley
Broccoli Romanesco and/or White, Purple or Yellow Cauliflower: Our fall cauliflower and Romanesco crops continue to trickle in. All of these selections may be used interchangeably in recipes calling for cauliflower. Include them in soups, stir-fry, baked casseroles, or fresh vegetable salads.
Teriyaki Chicken and Cauliflower
Green Top Celeriac: This is the round root vegetable with a celery like green top. Read more about this unique vegetable in last week’s vegetable feature article where you’ll find suggestions for how to prepare it, cook it and store it.
Celeriac Salad with Buttermilk Dressing
Celery Root and Hash Brown Cake
Rainbow Chard: Enjoy this nutrient and flavor-packed green as its season will end with the cold weather (when that happens). You can chop the leaves and steam them just enough to wilt them down. Cool and freeze them for use this winter in soups, casseroles, etc.
Swiss Chard, Potato & Chickpea Stew
Italian Garlic: It’s almost time to plant garlic! We’ll be pulling our seed garlic out of the cooler within the next week or so to start preparing it for planting.
Garlicky Broccoli Raab (or other greens) Fresh Mozzarella and Tomato Jam Sandwich
Green Romaine Lettuce: This is the first variety that is ready for harvest in our fall lettuce plantings. Enjoy a classic Caeser salad using this crispy, delicious romaine lettuce!
Simple Italian Grilled Romaine Salad
Yellow & Red Onions: Take advantage of some of our last tomatoes of the season and make a BLT with thinly sliced onions this week.
Creamy Caramelized Onion Chicken Thighs
Green and/or Red Bell Peppers: Cut them in half and stuff them with your favorite filling.
Greek Chicken Kabobs (with Peppers, Onions, Tomatoes)
Green Pepper Steak with Tomatoes and Onions
Orange and/or Red Italian Frying Peppers: These are the long, slender brightly colored peppers that are packed loose in your box this week. They are sweet peppers appropriate for eating raw or cooked. Our pepper fields are slowing down now, so if you have an overabundance of peppers, slice/chop them and put them in the freezer for use this winter.
Couscous Stuffed Sweet Peppers
Peter Wilcox or Purple Viking Potatoes: Peter Wilcox is a gold flesh, waxy potato that was bred for exceptional potato flavor. This is one of our favorites for roasting as well as being used in potato soup. Purple Viking Potatoes have purple skin with pink streaks and white flesh. We consider this to be more of an “all-purpose” potato. It’s dry enough to use for mashed potatoes but still holds its shape well if roasted or added to soups.
Mashed Potatoes with Celeriac & Leeks
Sheet Pan Roasted Chicken with Potatoes & Mini Sweet Peppers
Salad Mix: This bag of salad mix is nature’s fast-food gift to you this week. Just toss it with some oil and vinegar or your favorite pre-made vinaigrette. Add some cooked chicken, hardboiled eggs, nuts or seeds for protein and any other raw vegetables or fruit you may have available. You’ll have a salad for dinner in less than 10 minutes!
Mesclun and Mango Salad with Ginger Carrot Dressing
Chicken Milanese with Mesclun Salad
Spinach: This week’s spinach is our first fall planted green spinach, not the Red Tabby from the last couple of weeks. We hope to have this around for several more weeks (depending on frost) .
Variety of Tomatoes: Tomatoes are another easy item to preserve, with countless ways to do so. If you have more than you can eat fresh, consider slicing and dehydrating, cook them into a sauce you can freeze, or just freeze them whole and turn them into sauce or soup in the winter!
The 70 Most Delish Tomato Recipes
Baby White Turnips: These are also known as salad turnips and are a crop we grow only in the spring and fall when their flavor is mild and sweet. The turnips are thin-skinned and do not need to be peeled before eating either raw or cooked. The tender greens are also edible either raw or lightly cooked.
Turnip Salad with Yogurt, Herbs and Poppy Seeds
Vegetable Feature: Broccoli
Broccoli is in the Brassica family, along with cauliflower and cabbage. This green vegetable often looks like a tree when you find it in the grocery store, but in the field (and in our boxes) it sports collard greens like leaves that are also edible. We grow broccoli in the spring and fall, starting some of our plants out in the greenhouse, but planting the later crops directly into the soil in our fields.
Preparation & Usage: Broccoli should be washed prior to use. It can be eaten raw, boiled, steamed, roasted, or sautéed. Recent studies show that steamed broccoli is the best way to cook it in order to retain the most nutritional value. The edible leaves have a milder broccoli flavor than the stems and florets. You can use these leaves similar to how you would use kale or collards, as a cooking green, in smoothies, in salads, or roasted into chips!
Storage Tips: Broccoli should be stored, unwashed, loosely wrapped in plastic or a perforated bag, and in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator.
Health & Nutrition: While oranges are the most common thing that comes to mind when looking for Vitamin C, half a cup of broccoli contains 84% of the daily recommendation for this vitamin. It is also loaded with fiber, antioxidants, Vitamin K, iron and potassium.
Additional Fun Facts: The word broccoli comes from an Italian word that means “the flowering crest of cabbage.”
Short & Sweet Weekly Farm Update
We hope to see some of you this Sunday for our Annual Harvest Party! We plan to do a test dig on our sweet potatoes to see if they are ready yet. Will they be too big or need more time to grow bigger? You can be part of the decision-making process on Sunday!
We are starting to harvest our fall root crops: carrots, turnips, sunchokes, and rutabagas. Soon will be horseradish and burdock too! Once they are harvested, we spread compost on the field and plant the cover crop seeds right away!
