Fresh Greens for the Spring Solstice

By Vani Kannan

We rang in the Spring Solstice with a CSA delivery full of fresh green veggies. Sunday was a busy day, and I wanted to ring in the new season with something quick and fresh that used up the more-quickly-perishable fresh greens.

All good things begin with onions slowly sauteed in olive oil—one red, one yellow:

Once the red onion was done, I moved some to a second pan and added roughly-chopped CSA bok choy (which is very popular in this apartment). I browned the CSA beef with the rest of the red onion. The rest of the micro-greens joined the yellow onion:

Add a can of tomatoes and mixed Italian spice to the browned beef, boil up some quick pasta (I used Ronzoni Gluten Free cauliflower pasta with fava beans & rice flour from the C-Town on 204th St):

Super-quick, super-tasty, and still warm and comforting enough for early Spring.

I love freestyling simple recipes with CSA veggies. Fresh veggies are so tasty that they don’t need a lot of frills or spices. They taste amazing as is.

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A Great Way to Cook Cabbage

By : Patrice Hall

I have been visiting the SouthernLiving.com site a lot these days, they feature lots of classic recipes which I remember from when I was little having dinner at my Grandma’s home. I find great recipes using ingredients from my CSA share, and this one I find useful for prepping then freezing for later when you are pressed for time and need to place dinner on the table with the least amount of effort. You can find this recipe here - enjoy!


Cabbage Casserole

Active: 20 mins

Total: 40 mins

Yield: Serves 8 (serving size: about 1 1/2 cups)

Ingredients

Ingredient Checklist

5 tablespoons (2 1/2 oz.) salted butter, divided

1 medium (2 lb.) cabbage, shredded (about 10 cups)

1 cup chopped celery (about 2 stalks)

2 medium-size yellow onions, chopped (about 2 1/2 cups)

1 garlic clove, chopped (about 1 tsp.) or to taste

Cooking spray

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups evaporated milk (from 1 12-oz. can)

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

1/2 teaspoon black pepper, or to taste

4 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated (about 1 cup), divided

1/3 cup dry breadcrumbs

Directions


Step 1

Preheat oven to 350˚F. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet set over medium. Add cabbage, celery, onions, and garlic, and cook, stirring often, until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer to a 3-quart lightly greased (with cooking spray) baking dish.


Step 2

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a medium saucepan over medium; whisk in flour, and cook, whisking constantly, until smooth and thick, about 1 minute. Gradually add milk to saucepan, whisking constantly to remove any clumps. Cook, whisking constantly, until thickened and smooth, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat, and whisk in Worcestershire, salt, pepper, and 1/2 cup of the Parmesan until smooth. Pour sauce over cabbage mixture.


Step 3

Place remaining 1 tablespoon butter in microwavable bowl, and microwave on HIGH until melted, about 30 seconds. Add breadcrumbs and remaining 1/2 cup Parmesan to melted butter, and stir until combined. Sprinkle breadcrumb mixture evenly over cabbage.


Step 4

Bake in preheated oven until casserole is bubbly and breadcrumbs are golden, 20 to 25 minutes.

 

Lacto-fermentation with your Winter CSA

By : Elizabeth Wilson

I am delighted to write this post to share my mild obsession with pickled vegetables. My family’s dinner table famously includes pickles, apple cider vinegar, sauerkraut, and lacto-fermented CSA vegetables. Everyone in our family is required to eat one of those daily; guests are encouraged and occasionally inspired to partake, but not required.

To be more accurate, this post is about lacto-fermentation, but “lacto-fermentation” is not a good hook to get you to keep reading. “Pickling” is technically with vinegar and heat; a process which does not produce pro-biotics, which are great for your intestinal health. Various pickled/fermented foods have been a staple of my family’s diet since 2001, when my acupuncturist recommended a tablespoon of sauerkraut for me first thing every morning to improve my gut health. (I blame my poor intestinal health on the fact that I was on low levels of antibiotics for acne for several years as a teenager – antibiotics kill off good bacteria in your gut).

I maintain that this is the best way to prepare all of those winter CSA root vegetables because lacto-fermented veg:
            1. can be stored on the counter – I find that winter CSA root vegetables leave no room for anything else in the refrigerator.

            2. is delicious and great for your intestinal health.

            3. preserves the veg for up to a year - are you actually getting through all of those turnips and radishes every week?

I won’t go into all of the benefits of fermented foods, because you can read all about it in the websites below. But let me just say that you really don’t need any special equipment, I just use unfiltered tap water and I don’t even stress much about sanitizing. You can do this with nothing special, just the time you need to chop (which can be done by food processor or mandoline).

There are endless recipes to look through, so I narrowed it down for you to the ones I have used with success. I often put all of the root veggies in one big jar, in a big mix, but I do experiment with various flavorings in these recipes:

1. 1. The pickled turnips you get in shawarma – great on any sandwich! 
   2. Try these delicious flavorings for fermented beets. 
   3. In case that last website felt overwhelming, this one is a more basic one for beets 
   4. And, of course, you need this one for all of the radishes. 
   5. Still staring at those massive rutabagas from a couple weeks ago?
   6. And get ready for the summer CSA with these recipes: 
   7. Cucumber pickles 
   8. Hot sauce
      

Happy fermenting! Feel free to reach out to me at erwilson at gmail for pep talks and encouragement. 

Crispy Jerusalem Artichokes

 By: Patrice Hall

(Note:  This recipe is from bbcgoodfood.com, I removed the mace and instead added Himalayan salt and black pepper to suit my taste, you can add the mace if you wish..)

Crispy Jerusalem artichokes with roasted garlic & rosemary

Prep:  20 minutes

Cook:  50 minutes (plus soaking)

Serves 4

Ingredients:

800g Jerusalem artichokes

1 garlic bulb, cut down the middle

1 tbsp rosemary leaves, chopped

3 tbsp olive oil

Pinch Himalayan sea salt

Pinch Ground black pepper

20g butter

2 tsp lemon juice

STEP 1

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Soak the artichokes in cold water for 20 mins or so to loosen any dirt, then scrub them with a scourer, being sure to remove any grit. Halve the small ones and quarter the bigger ones, and put them in a roasting tin with the split garlic bulb and rosemary. Coat everything with the oil and season. Roast for 45-50 mins until tender inside and crispy outside.

STEP 2

To finish, squeeze the softened garlic cloves from their skins and toss with the roasted artichokes, along with the mace, butter and lemon juice.

CSA-The Best Way to Control Your Own Supply Chain

 By : Patrice Hall

I have been a member of Norwood CSA for 15 years, and I have never felt as fortunate to be a part of this group as I do now.  The broken food supply chain is becoming a large problem as some supermarket chains are facing shortages of all kinds of goods.  There are hundreds of cargo ships waiting off the coast of California to unload their goods, and the trucking industry is facing staffing shortages.  I am reading more and more articles highlighting the importance of buying local produce and goods as overseas shipping is not as reliable as it once was.  These factors point to one simple fact, families across the US must learn to control their own sources of food and necessities of life.

CSA’s are one way to do this, we purchase shares in a local farm and receive food shipped direct to us each week, which means we bypass the middle-man (supermarkets, store chains, etc.) who markup goods.  These stores also rely on overseas shipments and other factors, due to the pandemic staffing shortages shelves become bare when shipments are late.  Also, when the food finally arrives it is near its expiration date, or it is heavily treated with preservatives to extend shelf life.  By contrast, our weekly share from the farm is free of preservatives because it is picked fresh early that morning or canned that week, and the meat is fresh from colorants and other chemicals.

It is unfortunate that it takes a pandemic for us to realize just how fragile our supply chain is and how important local farms and producers are, but I am happy that the public is becoming aware of this.  Every week I strive to use every bit of my share and waste little, I also try to preserve as much as possible.  Maybe this will lead to more people joining CSA’s like ours in the future, and this will help local farms like Norwich Meadows thrive.

Boom...roasted

 By : Vaughan Myers-Jennings

This week's haul of vegetables gave us a rainbow of colors to eat!

Seriously, if my plate was this colorful as a child (and God bless my grandma, who was an amazing cook), I probably would have been more open to actually eating vegetables.

Radishes, turnips, beets, purple potatoes...there were so many choices.

But how do you make the most of all these radiant veggies? How can you possibly consume them all? Well, when in doubt...roast! In my many many years of vegetable eating (a whole 3 years), I've come to learn that the best way to get your proper intake AND make them tasty is to oven roast them. The process is very simple: preheat your oven to 400, chop them into similar sized pieces, place on a baking pan, season with a mixture of oil, salt, garlic powder and onion powder; put them in the oven and cook anywhere from 10-45 minutes (depends on the vegetables; make sure that you can pierce with a fork), and voila!

Now you have some tasty veggies to eat. Enjoy!