Jack’s Reveal Week 7
Welcome to week 7 of the Featherstone Farms Summer CSA program.
Wonderful crops to introduce you to. We're about to pack boxes. Let's show you what you might find in your box this week.
Sweet corn is on strong, folks. There are worms. We do our best to sort, but my solution is grilling corn. Don't create heat in the kitchen in the summer. I take a knife and cut right there. If there's a worm in there, I'll never even see it. It goes in the compost. Take the remaining ear of corn, right on the gas grill, rotating for about 20 minutes over medium heat, over and over and over. The skin will get charred. You have great corn inside, and you never deal with worms.
We have red cabbage, which is awfully nice. Summer treat salads.
Many questions about onions, folks. We have red onions this week in boxes. These are onions that are fresh harvested. The skins are not cured. They're beginning to paper up, but they're not dried and cured at the stem here, which is why we recommend that you keep them in your refrigerator until we let you know next time. When that really dries up and is no longer going to get soft and mushy, that's when they're ready to go in standard storage on top of your refrigerator, not in your refrigerator.
We have these wonderful gold zucchinis. Jenni made a zucchini salad this weekend that was to die for. We will post the recipe. They were essentially shredded greens, a gold zucchini, such wonderful flavor. That recipe we will post shortly.
More wonderful green beans. I cannot speak enough about our great team of pickers that are getting these at the right size when they're not overgrown. Pretty rare treat in any CSA program. Wonderful beans this week.
We are starting to get into many more warm season crops, including jalapeno peppers. For whatever reason, we grow really, really, really hot jalapenos here, folks. It doesn't have to be a ghost pepper or a Carolina reaper or whatever. Jalapenos can be really hot when they're grown in very, very good soil, so be cautious.
Ongoing issues with the Asian eggplants, but we have a lot of really wonderful globe eggplants right now for eggplant parmesan. I think we're subbing these in for Asians in certain cases, but many more eggplant to come. Really healthy, happy-looking crop here.
We are starting to move through the last of the spring kohlrabis. They don't look quite as nice as they were before, but they're still really healthy eating, but they do have to be peeled, and those insides can be used for summer dips, braided into salads with that zucchini salad, for example. Really still crunchy and flavorful. Summertime kohlrabis.
We have a new treat here this week for the first time, our shishito peppers. These, I think Abby has been growing for just a couple of years. I cook these in a dry cast iron skillet with coarse salt under pretty high heat, rotating. They're very fragrant. They will really smell up your kitchen. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Doesn't require a lot of heat to cook because a shishito pepper just simply needs to be blistered on the surface. A little bit of salt, dredged in salt, and can be eaten in about four or five minutes of cooking total. Wonderful shishito peppers.
Some greens here.
Again, a sturdy red kale and this wonderful rainbow French chard here. The French folks do not discard the leaves and eat the stems. Don't forget to eat those stems cut up in a saute pan or in a braising situation. Chard is really a wonderful summer crop.
We have a few herbs down here, basil and dill, but also salad mix. The last thing I'm going to talk about in this week's box, we're really trying to up our ante, as I've talked about in the past, with things like salad crops, prepared salads. This mix was grown in our high tunnels where we thought they were safe as can be from the main predator we have with the lettuces, which are deer, but we had deer in the high tunnels, folks. We've never had anything like this before. This is really desirable, wonderful mix, and the deer come from miles around to get it. We've lost a lot of mix. Very sorry for those of you that signed up for mix, expecting it in your box this week, but the deer got it. We will make it up to you. I'm sure. Salad mix is really a fall crop. It's the finest eating in the months of September, October. We will have a lot more of it then and in winter shares. But again, working on this one despite the pressure from deer.
Basil, back into summer basil. This is beautiful looking basil here for pesto and fresh dill, large volumes of dill here. If you don't use it right away this time of year, you can dry this stuff on a cookie sheet, and it will keep well into the winter. So that's it for week number eight. We will see you next week, folks. Thanks for being members.