Fall Market Box (Week 43)

More roots and some fixin’s for warm potato-leek soup in your boxes this week; try mincing up some red peppers in the soup for a little pizzaz.

Potatoes, Kennebec Great mashers. And All Blue Eye catching potato salad!

Tomato, slicer/heirloom variety This week’s tomatoes probably need a day or two for full ripening.

Tomato, cherry variety A little pile of red grape variety.

Pepper, sweet reds and purples

Cabbage, green Sweetening up nicely with these October frosts.

Boc choi, red Shred and toss with toasted sesame oil, seasoned rice vinegar, zested ginger root and a pinch of sea salt and a pinch of sugar.

Cauliflower, purple Serve it up on a veggie-dip platter at a Vikings football party— you’ll get some comments!
Rutabaga Try rutabaga mashed with potatoes. Rutabaga roasted with beets, onions, potatoes, daikon radish, tossed with balsamic vinegar/olive oil/sea salt/thyme.
Celery Chop finely and add to a large pot of onions, tomatoes, chili powder, sweet peppers, and kidney beans. Perfect chili for Sunday football!
Radish, Daikon/winter Eat fresh or cooked; packed with vitamin C.
Kohlrabi Chop and add to a boc choi sauté. Slice and munch with a tangy dill dip.
Beets, candy-striped Slice paperthin and season lightly with oil and vinegar and dill weed. A fresh winter salad!

Leeks Save the greens for making up a fresh batch of vegetable stock (along with celery leaves/heart, parsley stems, potato peels, etc); freeze for later use in winter soups.
Parsley Fresh tang will keep summer close to heart.

Recipes for your consideration

Try the winter roots with a different seasoning twist. Complex and full-flavored sidedish.

Pan-Fried Rutabaga

2 lb rutabaga, peeled, sliced into 1/4 × 2 inch pieces
3 Tbsp peanut oil
2 Tbsp yellow mustard seeds
2 tsp fresh ginger, grated
½ cup green onions or leeks, minced
Coarse salt and freshly-ground pepper

In a large saucepan over high heat, bring salted water to a boil. Stir in rutabaga, cooking for about 5 minutes, or until just softened (test it with a knife.) Drain rutabaga and set aside.

In a large frying pan over medium heat, heat oil until shimmering. Stir in mustard seeds and ginger. Cook for about 1 minute, or until mustard seeds start to pop and ginger starts to lightly brown.

Stir in rutabaga and cook for an additional 6-8 minutes, or until crisp and lightly browned, occasionally tossing to coat. Reduce heat to low and stir in salt and pepper and the green onions/leeks until wilted. Serve hot.

Recipe Adapted From: www.chow.com

A creative way to serve up the cauliflower; if this recipe doesn’t appeal, search “cauliflower steaks” online and you’ll find dozens of creative recipes!

Hummus-Crusted Cauliflower Steaks

1 large head cauliflower
salt and pepper
about 1/3 cup hummus
fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, rosemary, dill— your choice, optional)

Preheat oven to 400F.

Wash the cauliflower and trim off all the leaves and the bottom of the stem. Place it stem-down on your cutting board. Cut it in half straight down through the middle. Take each half and make another parallel cut so that you have two “steaks,” about 1/2 to 3/4-inch thick. Make one more parallel cut on each half, to try to get a total of 4 steaks.

Don’t worry if your final cut results in your cauliflower falling to pieces! How many steaks you get depends on the size and shape of your cauliflower. Reserve the individual florets for another use, or toss them with some hummus and roast them, too. (Individual florets will take less time, so be careful not to burn them.)

Sprinkle one side of each cauliflower steak with salt and pepper and place it pepper-side down on a non-stick or silicone-coated baking sheet. Spread hummus lightly on the top of each cauliflower piece and sprinkle with fresh herbs, if you want. Bake until cauliflower is just tender and hummus is beginning to lightly brown, about 30 minutes.

From: www.fatfreevegan.com

For Your Reading Pleasure

If you have had any inclination to try putting your own food “up”, the Ball Blue Book Guide To Preserving is the place to start. It has clear, concise instructions for water-bath canning (the first step in the art of canning) and many recipes that are “fool proof” and delicious too. It is an inexpensive endeavor to try, so you won’t lose much in the trying.

The next step up is pressure canning, and it is not that big of a step up. To help with that and expand your water-bath canning recipe collection, look for the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving—400 delicious and creative recipes for today. The nice part about being versatile with pressure canning is the flexibility it offers with leftovers. Four servings of chili left over? Pop it in the pressure canner and save it for many months. It makes quick lunches quite easy.

Farm News

We had our first hard frost last night. No use getting up early to harvest…everything still in its frosty coat until the sun breached the hill. (What am I saying, I am on a plane to Texas—temperature 75 degrees— and Rog is slogging thru the fields bringing in the harvest!)

Deer are starting to work the fields hard, fattening themselves up for the winter. I can’t figure out how they do it, but they can bite into a full head of cabbage and munch it down to a nubbin’. I guess planting 200 row-ft of winter cabbage was a good idea, so we can get at least some of it! They haven’t found the up-in-coming mini-broccoli and fennel yet; keep fingers crossed! Fall peas are LONG gone. (We are studying fencing options thoroughly; either 10ft high welded wire or 10ft wide hot-wire or 10ft slanted barbed wire. Everyone has their tricks and tips; gotta do it right the first time tho. Once they learn…fuhgetaboutit!)

High tunnel spinach and salad and leeks and carrots are coming along. We are taking notes and keep planting more each couple of weeks. The tunnel track is just about finished on the last section so moving day will be soon. Would someone hold the snow off until we get it moved, please?

Have a wonderful week, and enjoy the vegetables.

Roger and Lara