Decisions about farmshare, and dieffenbachia gives me a surprise

So this year's farmshare has not lived up to the excitement of previous years.  The farmers have made various decisions about crops and choices, and since I've been going to farmers' markets this year, too, I'm thinking about switching my budget next year to shop more at farmers' markets, just going to the farmshare farm for fruit, which is the best.

Mainly this year there has been only one farmshare location -- previous years they've switched to the other side of the farm with different crops for the second part of the season, and that's when the zinnias were part of the adventure, and a wider variety, it seemed to me, of fruit.

This year one location only, and I think fewer shares of fruit, no flowers, many fewer free add ons, smaller variety of vegetables, and a large amount of potatoes, way too many even for this potato lover.  I'm two weeks behind in my potato consumption, even sharing with Handsome Son, and there's another couple of pounds in this week's share. 

I spoke with the farmer today when I picked up, about this, and she, lifelong farmhouse dweller, and thrilled with their bumper spud crop,  seemed to be quite amazed to hear that there are homes in this town (most of them, in fact) without the capacity to store potatoes. 

I explained no garage, no basement, no cool upstairs rooms, and she said, well keep them on the patio, at which point I gave up, since bylaws flatly forbid keeping food on the patio because of squirrel and rat populations.  We can't even put out birdseed!  and speaking as a squirrel ridden homeowner, I'm in favor of the ban.  She ended by saying, well eat potatoes every day. No use explaining I'm already doing that, and I'm still swamped!

I can, and do, give away my surplus to friends and neighbors, but I can't afford to give half my share, no point in the membership then. Sooooo, thinking, thinking.  I was fair to her, though, pointing out that the imbalance didn't suit this customer.  If they announce any changes for next year I'll be in.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try making gnocchi  to freeze and see if that's a good solution to the Plethora of Potatoes, since I love gnocchi and have never made them.  Had wonderful ones long ago in France.

But I still think I might switch my allegiance next year to farm markets.  It's been fun, but maybe it's time.  And going to the farm market is a great morning out anyway, much more food variety and all kinds of interesting people.

So look for pix of gnocchi in process!  This month's Bite Club cook is Nigella Lawson, and I love the way she writes, very readable and honest, and I hate the photographs of herself, very cheesy, supposed to be ironic, but come off silly and a bit cheap, throughout the book. If I were to buy this one, I'd cut out all the pix of her and just keep the food!  

Last month I made, from the 123 book, by  Rozane Gold, her maple walnut bars, and they were just lovely.  They were made in the late afternoon, polished off at the club meeting, and no pix are available, sorry. Maple walnut is a favorite flavor, dating back to historic times which I'll talk about another time, not wishing you all to nod off today...

And, back in the living room, the dieffenbachia gave me a heck of a surprise, by putting out five new flowers, in the house.  I was surprised enough when she did it last year out of doors, in excellent light, but I guess she's got the hang of it now, and see her latest effort.  Since there are few insects indoors to pollinate her, she's going to be disappointed.  

They are hermaphroditic -- first part of the bloom is male, I think then that fades and what appears is female, or it may be the other way around. The interval for insects to fertilize is only a matter of hours or days, so these are finely engineered plants.  

You only need one plant to propagate flowers, no need to worry about a partner.  What you see here is the first bloom of the cluster, to be replaced by a different appearance to the same spike.Can't name her, unless I choose a gender neutral name.  Dana the Dieffenbachia, or Tracy, or Evelyn or something.

All this activity in here today is treading water while I get up the gumption to start painting my kitchen tomorrow...now that the Big Insulation is done, little last bits all complete and working fine, and the dress I made into a coat thing is all finished and ready to wear, and the plants are indoors, and I can't think of any other household chores to use to postpone the Painting of the Walls, I'm for it.  One wall per session is my mantra.

Hardest part is getting out the can of paint and stirring.  After that it usually goes pretty well.  I'm thinking of tiling the backsplash wall, too with copper tiles.  Or possibly farming that job out, but I'd rather do it myself.  Anyway, that wall won't be painted.  

The kitchen is awkward, not that many square feet, but a lot of stuff to move around and climb over and reach behind.  I have a nice gallon of lovely fresh green paint, free from the dumpster, so that's a small investment..and I already removed the phone jack from the sink wall, dating back to when I had a landline, easy to remove, and the hole will vanish under the tiles.

And The Farmer Is The One Who Feeds Us All!

Final harvest home from the farmshare for 2014.  Great year of produce, with apples being the best ever.

 

Seen here in November afternoon light in my kitchen, winter squash, frying peppers, bell peppers, several species of apples, Asian pears, broccoli.   

Typing awkwardly, because of kitchen injury, slicing into bell peppers to make lovely rings, finger got involved there, oh.  No blood on the food, though, in case that's an issue!

 

From now till May my Tuesday afternoons will be an oasis of quiet, no frenzy of chopping, dicing, slicing, mincing, bagging, freezing, cooking.  

What on earth will I do with the time.  Yeah, it's sure to be all empty, yeah, that's right...just like taking a bowl of water from a bathtub and expecting the rest of the water to stay put..

Meanwhile, great props to the Stults family of Cranbury for their multi generational family farm, whose centenary comes up next year.  Can't wait to see what they'll do to celebrate it! 

Go here to find out more about them.

Near the end of the farmshare season

Fall food came home today, along with ornamental gourds to decorate with for Thanksgiving, which is a few weeks ahead.

Wonderful season of food, completely ruins a person for shopping in stores.

Apple Jam, with the assistance of Dolliver Dreads and her little friend

Having a farmshare, only two more weeks to go, twenty six weeks of great produce, definitely pushes you to new levels of vegetable and fruit prep and eating.  The apple crop this year is amazing, at least three different varieties, all huge and perfect fruit, literally handpicked.  The farm family are proud of their new bit of equipment allowing their picker to get the fruit a bit faster, but it's still one individual working up in the trees.

So, all the squash being roasted, stirfried, made into soup, made into bread, baked, made into french fries, that was the squash scene.  And a ton of green vegetables, which will make great stir fries and soup and bread eventually. And the apples have been: applesauce, apple salad tossed with a bit of mayonnaise, no need to get all carried away,  various forms of crumble, and now I made apple jam. Not jelly, jam.

Caramel apple jam,to be exact, with the assistance of Dreads Dolliver and her little friend, who wouldn't tell me her name.  The pix are still firmly stuck in my camera, and you should have heard their screams of rage, after all their work, slaving over a hot jam pot, before they flounced off back to their shelf, but I hope to reveal the pix and their hard work when a new camera comes into my life soon...

Meanwhile, this week's apple share made exactly six cups of cubed apple, just what the recipe ordered, and we'll see how it goes. Very sweet, I'm guessing, judging from all the brown sugar. And it used up the last of this year's pectin supply.  So I hope it works.

Other experiments: I made yogurt cheese from my homemade yogurt and it's really good.  I got about a cup of whey off it, so that's in the freezer for next time I make a squash/sweet potato/pumpkin soup, whichever happens first.

I tried out the cheese, just a bit spread on, on top of a helping of crumble from the freezer.  I must say that time and freezing improved that anonymous crumble considerably.  The y. cheese was good on top, cut the sweetness.

So that's your low tech blogger sighing and sadly waving goodbye to my loyal old Coolpix cameras, faithful to the end, not their fault their software got old and unsupported.  Don't we all....

Sweet potato and apple soup day

Today I had sweet potatoes to deal with in my farmshare, as well as a ton of other stuff.  Gave away two ears of corn, having enough corn in the freezer to see me through indefinitely, but I steamed and peeled and chunked the sweet potatoes last evening, and today used one of the giant apples in the farmshare for soup.

The apple was an eater, so it was fairly sweet, so, to offset the sweetness, I used a cup or so of yogurt whey from the freezer (from when I made yogurt cheese) and the tang is wonderful.  

Usual base of mucho olive oil,  garlic, onions, turmeric, fresh ground black pepper, kosher salt.  I like to cook all the spices in the oil along with the onion and garlic, to let the flavor out.  I learned this from an Indian cook, good way to deal with curry powder, too.

Then the apple in chunks, and the sweet potato, about three medium ones, and the liquid was asparagus water and other vegetable water from the freezer as well as the yogurt whey.  

I save the water I use to steam vegetables, for this purpose.  This time I avoided veggie water such as potato water or dark green veggie water,  that might discolor the nice golden effect of this soup, but in other soups, I wouldn't be concerned about color.

Let this all cook gently for about half an hour while I nipped across the street to confer about the proposed bathtub work with friend and neighbor who is not only a great contractor, and a good artist, but is a brilliant cook, too.  He makes his own ice cream.  And last fall when I was very sick, he ran over with wonderful homemade soup to restore my energy. 

So today we swapped recipes as well as catching up on the local news, too, and getting into preliminary chat about the bathtub.

Home again I blended the soup, and it came out very nicely. Here's the helping for lunch, awaiting croutons, just sizzling in the pan.

and here's the bowl complete with wholewheat/oat croutons, wish you could hear the sizzle as the croutons land! but you can also put a nice swirl of plain yogurt and I might do that with a future serving.

A seedless watermelon in the share, too, so dessert was a big bowl of watermelon chunks, no need to add anything to improve it. And it was eaten before I thought to make a pic, sorry.

 

Supper from the Farm, blissful

Today was farmshare day, and after the usual mad blur of washing and brushing and scraping and chopping and slicing and steaming and freezing, and sorting, my reward was a wonderful fresh dinner.

 Quarter of a totally ripe cantaloupe, doused with ginger powder and a scoop of plain yogurt over with a bit of honey, good stuff, trailed over.  After a dish of tomatoes, diced, salted with kosher salt, peppered with freshground black pepper, left to mellow for an hour.

Then a nice glass of red wine, Yellowtail Shiraz.  Afterwards a cup of strong coffee.  I find that caffeine in the evening doesn't bother me at all, in fact I sleep better, so I don't need to deprive myself.

Perfect early Fall meal, cool day with bright sun.

Latest adventures in food from the farmshare

This week the share included a half head of cabbage.  If you don't do stuffed cabbage, and a half head would feed a small army with stuffed cabbage, which I don't like anyway, then what's to do?

So I cut it into wedges, steamed it till nearly tender yesterday, and put in the fridge overnight while I thawed a bag of homemade spaghetti sauce.  

Today I put the cabbage in a casserole dish, poured the spag sauce over it, grated a big helping of sharp cheddar over and a big shake of the Indian hot spicy snack I showed you some time ago as my secret weapon.  45 minutes at 390F and it was pretty nice.  

Cabbage was tender, but still had shape, sauce went well with it, and the spicy and cheesy top helped the general neediness of cabbage pretty well.  Since I'd made the spaghetti sauce, I knew there were already a lot of flavors in it, so I didn't need to add spices or salt to the casserole.

So here's my Chou Gratine, avec epices, in red sauce. This as you see would make one helping for four people, or one helping four times for moi.  Or one snack for a veggie teenage boy.

Bringing in the Sheaves. And More Sheaves. And Yet More Sheaves..

This is the time of year when the farmshare is at its height, and physically lifting the share becomes a planning operation. 

Yesterday's looks like this:

raw material for redskin potato salad, corn chowder, spaghetti sauce, shredded zucchini for bread, broccoli for steaming, bell peppers for stuffing and stirfry, and eggplant gift for neighbors. 

My farmshare will take me right through to next March without buying any vegetables other than carrots and celery, which won't grow around here. But between here and there is a lot of activity in the kitchen.  Good thing I sharpened my chef's knife this week.

Update on the oat flour: it makes great pancakes, too.  Oat flour and walnut pancakes this morning for breakfast, with a nice drizzle of honey.  Makes it worth getting up in the morning.

More food, I'm in a frenzy...

The farmshare this time of year becomes a pressing priority to those of us froogle folk who can't bear to waste food.  So the jam, and the tomato sauce, and the veggie quiches, and all that happen. As well as a frenzy of chopping and slicing and prepping for the freezer.  I did give away a bunch of eggplant to happy neighbors, too.

Today I made some sort of dish, can you help me name it, blogistas? 

anyway, I used a glass lasagna pan, rubbed with butter -- I save butter wrappers in the freezer from the rare times I buy it, use them to butter pans, then toss, works lovely.  

And put in a couple of handfuls of zucchini sticks, cut like big french fries, four ears of corn, cut off the cob, four eggs beaten with kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, a big swoosh of Italian seasoning stuff, turmeric, handful of grated cheddar cheese.  

Poured this over the vegetables, sprinkle of red pepper on top.  Baked at 350 for 30 minutes.  This, yet another kitchen experiment, worked fine, as you see my lunch serving.  The veggies were still bitey, not too soft, nice flavor, very fresh.

This was my second course,the first being a tomato cubed and salted and that was all it needed for a wonderful first course. Simply nothing better than a tomato fresh from the vine.  I never eat them in winter -- that's when I use my spaghetti sauce from the freezer.  Anyway, the tomato was gone before I thought of a pic, oh well.

Nonfood things will return to this blog, promise.  Oh yes, gardening exploits, hm, yes, been doing those, too. But you don't need to hear about my allergy issues, that's been a feature, too, but too boring.

Veggies veggies all around, ways to cook them abound

Contemplating large amounts of shredded zucchini and chopped green beans and onions in the freezer,  after an avalanche of frozen items fell on me, I thought, self, you had better use some of this up.  The farmshare season is in full swing, tons of fresh vegetables falling on me every week, and I eat fresh, share round several friends, and still have plenty to freeze.

Sooooo, I thought, what about Diane's  crustless spinach quiche? Daunted only for a moment by not having a lot of eggs and no spinach, I figured, fewer eggs is okay.  

And I made a nice sort of quiche using caramelized onions and garlic, except for the garlic segment that flew across the kitchen and vanished as I was smashing them with my knife blade, Pepin style, this never happens to him, unless they edit that bit out..where was I?  oh right, big cup of shredded zucchini and cut green beans, plenty of shredded cheddar, three eggs, seasoned with kosher salt, dry mustard, cumin, buttered pie plate, 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, and here's a nice dish. The seasonings are not very evident, but just make it interesting to eat.

Several lunches here.  And since corn is a staple of my farmshare, next one will perhaps be a corn quiche.  I might experiment with freezing it, just to see if it works out.