Jack’s B.U.G. Video for 8-14-24

Hello, welcome to week nine of the Featherstone Farm Summer CSA program. It's been cool, folks. Here we'll focus on what's in the box this week, what to do with it, and what to use.

Wonderful, sweet corn. It's been a good production year on sweet corn.

We have our second week of watermelons. And folks, this is one of the single most difficult jobs that we do at Featherstone Farm all year. And that is to evaluate ripeness of melons in the field. We are really doing our very best. Please have faith in us.

This one is dead right. This is what we want to see. Black seeds but firm flesh in the heart. This is going to be a good eating watermelon. This is an early variety called cafe bell. We are doing our best to bring them in dead right like this. Good eating for late summer. Really good. Really good.

We have eggplants in the box. A little bit small. Globe eggplants. A little bit smaller but nice. Small, no seeds in this guy. Great eggplant parmesan weather and eggplant adobo.

We have our first week of potatoes. These are blue potatoes, folks. Purples inside and out. I think of the purple potato as a slightly starchier potato. This will be good for baking. I'm going to recommend that you take these, spread them with olive oil and a little bit of salt and pepper. Put them right on the grill at a low heat over a gas grill and bake them like that for 30 to 40 minutes. Blue potatoes. Some of the potatoes this week may be red but we have more blue coming next week. Potatoes are new potatoes which means that the skins are not set which means that they will scrape. Which means that you're going to want to keep them in the refrigerator.

We now have yellow onions here. This is more of a cured onion. You can see the top of that is a little bit moist but it's drier. The skins are papering. These are cured onions. Do not need to be refrigerated. Keep them on top of your fridge at room temperature.

Sun gold cherries. As I spoke about in the other video, cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes are slowly ripening with cool nights. I'm very sorry. We're shorting a lot of tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes this week but please be patient. They're in the pipeline. There'll be a lot coming in the next few weeks when it warms up at night. These sun gold cherries, nothing better ‘eating’.

Heirloom tomatoes are all field grown here folks. We have high tunnels but we're using them for off-season spring and fall production. We're growing all our tomatoes outdoors as opposed to in tunnels and for that reason they're exposed to the elements. They need warm nights, and they do get sick when it rains as it did this spring. So, we have a certain number of deformities. This is called cat-facing. Not a huge defect because it's a dry scab on there. It can be cut away with a knife. The rest of the fruit will still be good eating. The rest of these tomatoes, we're picking them young. We pick them greener because they don't ripen effectively when it's cool at night in the 50s. It will ripen better on your counter than it will ripen in our field when it's so cool at night like this. This tomato has got four or five more days of ripening, but it will come around and will have really good flavor.

Tomatillos are in the box this week. This is a fine one for our salsas. It's a husk tomato, a new crop for us. We've grown years ago but are bringing them back in. You're going to want to pull that husk off. They can be parboiled and blended for a green salsa. They can be roasted on a dry stove top for a little bit of extra flavor and then blended for tomatillo salsa with jalapenos, with other onions, other things that we've got here. Very fine salsa kind of year.

Kales, red and green kale, nice fat bunches, healthy. These are growing well this time of year. Kale salads if you don't want to heat up your kitchen.

Basil, we have some basil but again, not growing effectively with the cool night. We've had to short some members the basil but there's a lot more in the production line. Please be patient.

The final thing I'd like to talk about a little bit here, peppers. We are growing a lot of different varietals this year. We're trying some new things. Shishito, these are I believe a kind of a banana pepper. This has got real heat to it but if you cut out that pith and seeds it will be a lot less. And what I'm going to recommend for this is a kind of pepper, is a dry skillet blistering which you can do either by cutting in half and removing the seeds and pith if you don't want the heat or just putting that entire fruit on a dry cast iron griddle. Rotate around for a period of five to ten minutes depending on how well you want it cooked. The skins will blister. They can be scraped off with a knife or you can eat them if you prefer but there's just nothing like a dry roasted pepper to go with the salsa or to go with a taco this time of year. Fine eating peppers. Should be red and green, red bell peppers ripe soon.