CSA Share Notes:

Welcome to this week’s Spring CSA harvest.  Each week come here for info about your share items and ideas for how to use them.

Here’s this week’s vegetable line up

• Kale—Large shares received our beautiful, tender Red Russian kale, with its large, flat, oak shaped leaved. Regular shares received a pretty bunch of curly kale, the variety you’re most likely used to seeing in the grocery store.  Mini shares received the highly chef-prized Lacinato kale, sometimes called Dinosaur kale.  We prefer this one in soups, but it’s great however you like kale. Try our Rainbow kale salad with lentils, or my favorite way to eat it: massaged kale salad, to which you can add any number of delicious toppings. I love it with just fresh strawberries or mango and a little bit of feta. Super simple.
• Swiss Chard—For the Regular and Mini shares. This hearty green is related to beets and tastes really mild like spinach (to which it’s also related). It’s excellent when it’s this young and tender to turn it into a fresh salad. We like to mix it with arugula, parmesan, pine nuts, and fresh or dried fruit with a honey vinaigrette. Alternately, it’s wonderful braised with lots of onion and garlic.
• Spinach—A bag of fresh, iron-rich baby spinach just for the Large shares.
• Arugula—Large and Regular shares received a bag of arugula this week.  These leaves are super flavorful and are excellent paired with goat cheese and strawberries this time of year. A slightly sweet dressing will cut through the peppery arugula bite.
• Radishes— An enormous bunch this week!  (we’re drowning in radishes! We’ll probably have a large abundance of them for one more week, then we won’t have them for a while.) Easter Egg variety for all the Large and Regular shares, and either French Breakfast or Easter Egg for the Mini shares. We like to dip into hummus or just snack on them sliced thin with sea salt and lemon juice.  You can cook radishes, too! Try them roasted.
• Lettuce— A petite baby head of our favorite and lovely skyphos lettuce to all the Large and Regular shares, and a New Red Fire lettuce to the mini shares. These baby heads are a teaser of what’s to come. Get ready for lettuce! In about 2 more weeks we’re gonna have tons of it ready.
• Garlic Scapes—For the Large and Regular shares.  This is a very special treat you can only get in late April or Early May when the conditions are right. The garlic plants begin to send up their flower stalk towards the sunshine in the spring time, but in order to get as large a head of garlic as possible, you need to pull out the flower stalk as soon as it appears so the plant doesn’t focus any energy on flowering, but rather recommits itself to growing that huge, pungent root bulb.   The scape is the central garlic stalk that would become a flower if we allowed it to grow. It’s mildly garlicky, tender, and so so delicious.  To prepare, chop the whole thing up into small bits (discarding any parts that are too woody) and saute in the place of garlic in any recipe. The flavor is much more mild, so use about 3-4x as much as you would garlic. If you’re into pickling, these make an incredible lacto-fermented snack. That’s what we’re doing with the extras this weekend.  These also make a fantastic pesto with lots of nuts and parmesan.
• Hakurei Turnips—This great Japanese offering is crisp and mild, even a tiny bit sweet. It’s considered a “salad turnip” and is wonderful raw.  Put it in salads, or slice and sprinkle with lemon juice and salt, or dip it in hummus. But if you want to cook them, you can. Here’s the traditional way to do up your turnips: wash them well, discard any yellowing leaves, then coarsely chop the greens and roots separately.  Saute a couple of chopped strips of bacon or leftover Sunday ham with a few big handfuls of diced onion and garlic till softened, then add your roots till beginning to soften. Next toss in your greens and about 1 cup of chicken stock, salt, black pepper corns, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes.  Simmer and stir the greens down until they’re as softened as you like them. Eat with a side of buttery cornbread.

Veggie Storage tips:

Everything will keep longest stored in the fridge sealed up in produce bags.  All root crops should be severed from their tops to keep the roots from getting rubbery, and the greens stored separately, sealed up to stay fresh.  Garlic scapes will be happiest treated as your greens, kept cold in the fridge sealed up so they don’t dry out.  Everything will need a gentle washing before cooking, but leave the dirt on until you’re ready to use them to prevent spoilage.

We’d love to hear stories and recipes of your culinary adventures this week. Send us a note or post a comment of how you’ve used your CSA share.

Your farmers, Jess & Justin

Regular Share

Regular Share top left to right: Swiss Chard, Skyphos lettuce, Easter Egg radishes, (2nd row) Hakurei turnips, Garlic scapes, arugula, Curly kale.

Large Share

Large Share top left to right: Spinach, Skyphos lettuce, Easter Egg radishes, (2nd row) Hakurei turnips, Garlic scapes, arugula, Red Russian kale.

 Mini Share

Mini share: Swiss Chard, New Red Fire lettuce, French Breakfast radishes, (2nd row) Hakurei turnips, Lacinato kale.

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