What’s In The Box with Recipe Suggestions
Baby Bok Choi: This green is a staple crop for our farm, and one we plant for twenty or more weeks from early spring to late summer! We are down to our final crops, so we wanted to give you one more opportunity to enjoy this green. You may eat it raw or lightly cooked.
Miso Soup with Bok Choi, Carrots & Noodles
Red Beets: Use beets in tasty winter salads, soups, or simply roasted. Store them in the refrigerator in a plastic bag to keep them from dehydrating
Carrot & Beet Morning Glory Muffins with Honey & Hazelnuts
Broccoli: Use the stems and the floret portion of the broccoli to make a Broccoli Salad with Bacon & a Creamy Dressing. Pair this salad with barbecued ribs, burgers or grilled chicken!
Broccoli Salad with Bacon & A Creamy Dressing
Orange Carrots: Soup season is upon us and carrots are a staple soup ingredient! Check out this week’s recipe suggestions for several tasty, nourishing soup options!
Ultra Satisfying Chicken Noodle Soup
Southwest Carrot & Black Bean Soup
Cilantro: We are getting close to the end of the season but wanted to squeeze in some more cilantro before the season comes to a close. Cilantro is a versatile herb that is used across the world in many cuisines from Mexico to Asia. Try it in our featured recipe too Sweet Potato Refried Bean Tostadas.
Italian Garlic: A little garlic is just what you need sometimes to raise the flavor profile of a dish. Raw garlic is the most pungent flavor, so if you are looking for something a little more mellow, subtle or sweet, sauté or roast.
Red Russian Kale: We plant this variety of kale as one of our “greens” selections for our salad mix, but the greens sometimes grow faster than the lettuce and if the timing doesn’t work out…..the greens get to be too big to go with the lettuce varieties. When this happens, it opens the door to harvest this selection as a larger leaf bunched green! This is a great sauté green, wilted down with garlic, ginger and onions and seasoned with just a touch of toasted sesame oil and soy sauce! Try it in our featured recipe too Sweet Potato Refried Bean Tostadas.
Creamy White Bean Soup with Kale and Gremolata
Red Batavia or Green Boston Lettuce or Escarole: This is the last of our fall lettuce varieties. Some boxes will already make the shift to the gorgeous heads of escarole.
Chopped Autumn Salad with Honey Cider Dressing
Escarole Salad with Oranges, Pistachios, and Pickled Onions
Rigatoni with Escarole & White Beans
Jalapeño: The crew wanted to make sure you had one last chance for jalapeños before we get a hard frost later this week.
Yellow & Red Onions: The key to caramelizing onions is patience! Sauté them in a pan with a large surface area over medium to medium low heat and stir periodically to keep them from getting crispy brown. As they cook, the moisture will evaporate from the onion (as evidenced by steam rising from the pan), thereby concentrating the natural sugars in the onion which give caramelized onions a sweet flavor.
White Daikon Radish: There is no need to peel this daikon as the exterior skin is thin. Use daikon raw in salads or pickled as a condiment. It may also be cooked in stir-fry or stew!
11 Best Recipes With Daikon Radish
Tsukemono – Amazuzuke (Sweet Vinegar Pickling)
Purple Splendor and Vermillion or Covington Sweet Potatoes: We are kicking off sweet potato season with two varieties in each box. All boxes will contain a small amount of Purple Splendor and one of the Orange varieties. Sweet potatoes are being referred to as a “superfood,” and purple sweet potatoes in particular are packed with powerful antioxidants. Vermillion is a trial variety this year and the yield was a little less than we hoped for, meaning not all boxes will see this variety. See this week’s recipe suggestions for some tasty purple sweet potato recipes!
Simple Steamed Purple Sweet Potatoes
Purple Sweet Potato Cashew Butter Eggs
Tat Soi: This is the big, beautiful green with spoon shaped leaves and light green stems. It may be eaten raw or cooked. Use it in ways similar to how you might use spinach, chard or other greens.
Freezable Stuffing with Kale and Caramelized Onions
Angel Hair (Spaghetti) Squash: This week we’re delivering spaghetti squash. It had been a few years since we have grown spaghetti squash, but it made it back to our farm this year. Spaghetti squash differs from other squash in that the flesh can be scraped away from the skin in strands that look like spaghetti, hence the name. It has a very mild flavor and goes well in many savory preparations.
Butterkin Squash: This squash is a hybrid variety that has the shape of a pumpkin with skin and flesh that resembles a butternut. Use this squash in any way you would use butternut squash
Maple Butter Roasted Butterkin Squash with Hot Chili Oil
Cheesy Au Gratin Potatoes with Butternut Squash
Vegetable Feature: Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potatoes are one of our most popular fall crops and CSA members look forward to every year. They are a staple fall vegetable with a long storage potential that will last the next 4-6 months! They are also very versatile in their uses, which means you have the opportunity to get creative and enjoy sweet potatoes in a wide variety of recipes over the next few months!
Sweet potatoes are a tropical vegetable, which makes it a bit of a challenging crop to grow in our northern climate. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about growing sweet potatoes and have refined a pretty good production system. We wait until we are past the last frost in May before we plant our sweet potato slips (slips is the term we use for the young plants we transplant into our field). We plant them into raised beds that are covered with a dark plastic mulch to trap heat, making the plants think they are in a tropical environment. This summer’s heat was good news for the sweet potatoes, although we had to make sure they received enough water and nutrients through the drip irrigation lines buried under the plastic mulch. Harvest typically happens in late September or early October. We always cross our fingers for a stretch of several dry days without precipitation to finish the harvest. This fall we were lucky enough to have very good harvest conditions. Over the course of just a few days, our rockstar crew had all of the harvest packed up into wooden crates and tucked into our greenhouse. This year we have about 44,000 pounds of sweet potatoes safely tucked away for storage!
Straight out of the field, our sweet potatoes taste ok, but not good enough to eat (in our opinion). That’s right, we have a rule around here that you don’t really eat sweet potatoes until they have been ‘cured’. When first harvested they are starchy, not very sweet or tasty, and the skins are very tender requiring careful handling. Sweet potatoes aren’t truly sweet potatoes until we “cure them.” Curing is a process by which we hold the sweet potatoes at high heat and high humidity for 7-10 days. During this time, the starches in the potatoes are converted to sugars and the skin becomes more stable for long term storage. Richard checks the brix levels (a measure of sugar content) before, during and at the end of this process. Once they are cured, we reduce the temperature and humidity levels for longer storage.
If stored properly you can eat sweet potatoes all winter! The ideal storage temperature for cured sweet potatoes is 55-65°F. If you don’t have the perfect location to store them at their ideal temperature, it’s better to store them at room temperature instead of putting them in the refrigerator.
Sweet potatoes are less starchy and sweeter and moister than regular potatoes and have a wide variety of uses. You can simply bake them whole until fork tender and eat the flesh right out of the skin. They are also delicious, cut into bite-sized pieces and roasted or cut them into wedges or thin slices and make roasted fries or chips. Sweet potatoes also make delicious, hearty soups and stews, may be added to chili, shredded, and fried like hash browns, or just simply cook and mash or puree them. They are also delicious when incorporated into biscuits, rolls, quick breads, cookies, bars, cheesecake and more!
Sweet potatoes are also very nutritious! They are a great source of complex carbohydrates and are high in fiber as well as vitamins and antioxidants that are helpful for preventing cancer, reducing inflammation and boosting immunity. We have referenced this article before, but it is worth the read if you want to learn more about the health benefits of sweet potatoes. Sweet Potato—A Valuable Medicinal Food: A Review. While sweet potatoes are often peeled, they don’t have to be, and you just might want to take advantage of those valuable nutrients!
Short & Sweet Weekly Farm Update
The sweet potatoes are done curing now and we are excited to be able to pass them along to you this week. We are also looking at the predicted cold temperatures this week, and burr, they are looking at lows in the 20’s. That means we are planning to cover some fields in order to prolong some of the more delicate plants. But this cold means it may be the end for many of the less cold-hardy greens, including baby bok choi, cilantro, green mustard, etc.
Along with preparing the fields for colder temperatures, Kelly is turning her attention to starting to plan for the 2026 CSA season. Don’t worry, we still have 5 more share boxes after this week and 2 meat deliveries this season! Oh, and we are also planning 2 more produce plus (end of season) offers too! Never a dull moment in the office!
