Jack’s Reveal Week #5 7/16/24

Hello and welcome to week five of the Featherstone Farms summer CSA program. We're coming off another week of rain. I'll talk about implications for boxes in the future and crops for the future, but the good news is that we have sunshine today and it looks like we're turning a corner on this folks. There will be a lot nicer early season fruit coming next week. Cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, other things, pretty exciting.

This week we do have sweet corn and the first corn of the year, organically or conventionally, has more bug pressure and specifically worms that will get into the silks and the ends of the ears. We do our best to sort them out, but we can't catch every one. If you do get a beautiful ear like this one that has a worm on the end, please be patient, prune it off. The rest of the corn is all good and be hopeful that the next week, the week after that, there will be less and less pest pressure every week. But super good tasting sweet corn. We will be making a longer video soon about all the factors that make Featherstone Farms sweet corn, in particular, so remarkably tasty for CSA boxes.

We have red cabbage this week, which is an awfully nice one. This is a later variety than the greens that we've had. Red cabbage for German meals of all sorts, braising with bacon or ham. I recommend, even in the cooler summer weather in July, like we're about to have, it can be a really tasty one.

Broccoli, once again, we're picking heads small because of the potential for little black spots and beads associated with rainfall. This should be the last week where we have these small heads. With any future pickings, hopefully getting larger heads of broccoli.

Cucumbers, we have a lot of cucumbers right now. I spoke last week about the issue of pollinators on the flowers and curved cubes being associated with poor pollination, which is associated with rainfall. If any luck, we'll turn a corner on this one and have straighter, nicer cubes week on week, moving forward.

We have French radishes, Easter egg radishes, and Hakka rye turnips, both of them thin-skinned for slicing, perfect for dips.

Zucchini is a consistent producer. They seem to be doing remarkably well despite the rainfall. A lot of zucchini in the pipeline for roasting on the grill. And with roasting on the grill, also eggplant. Early Asian types that cook quickly on the grill. I made some myself last week for baba ghanoush, and I'm going to be writing about for the newsletter this coming week. But roasting eggplant on the grill with or without zucchini, is really a fine one for baba ghanoush.

And then parsley. Don't overlook parsley as a salad green. It hsas a really rich, deep flavor, and nutrient-dense. I made tabbouleh salad at the same meal with the baba ghanoush that I'll be writing about end of this week. Parsley is the key to a good tabbouleh salad. I'll be writing about my recipe and how you might make it in the future with this week's newsletter.

French summer crisp lettuce. These are not conventional varieties of lettuce. These are types that are bred to take more heat in the summer and I will recommend so strongly for flavor. My goodness, lettuce will often get bitter when it's hot out in July. But this variety is not bitter. Eat it with just a little bit of oil and vinegar. Don't smother it in ranch. I really recommend this summer crisp lettuce.

Kale, green kale is a consistent party producer in all weather. Nice fat bunches for whatever you use.

Braising mix. This is another experimental crop. We're trying to expand the range of crop offerings for CSA shares. Braising mix is a new experimental one. Not available for every share this week. But with success we'll add it out. This is not washed. You might want to rinse quickly. Combination of kales, Asian greens, things that can be stir-fried or very lightly braised. But these are tender greens. You do not need a lot of cooking. They could be massaged with dressing to make a fresh salad. This combination of all different flavors is a wonderful thing. We'll be doing more of this in the future with salad mixes as we expand.

Look forward to peppers, other summer crops, cherry tomatoes soon.

See you next week.