Enright Ridge CSA Encourages Others with New Book: "Starting Your Own Urban CSA"

The Enright Ridge CSA is a co-operative community-supported agriculture project. Volunteers came together to make the project a reality; they hired an experienced farmer who provided guidance as they learned about high-production farming, successive plantings, and high-volume production techniques. It was a partial fulfillment of Jim Schenk's dream; he's wanted to have a CSA in Price Hill for nearly three decades.

By its second year, the CSA was providing produce for more than 100 people for six months of the year on less than an acre of land. By the end of that second year, it was time to think about the second part of Jim Schenk's dream--a CSA in every neighborhood. Some of the CSA's members decided to share what they had learned about urban co-op farming, with the belief that other neighborhoods can learn from the Enright CSA experience—both from successes and missteps. 

A lot of people worked together to get a grant, create an outline, research the subject, take photos, and generally do what needed to be done to put a book together. It's taken a couple of years, and we got it posted online last autumn (you can find it here).

But now it's a real, hands-on, analog book, too, and with the grant, we were able to keep the price low. There will be copies available from Enright CSA, and it's even on Amazon now--click here or just search for Starting Your Urban CSA. With this book, author Jim Schenk’s dream may well become a reality, as he inspires every neighborhood across the country and around the world to support flourishing urban farms. It’s time to learn how to feed ourselves again, and the information in this book encourages everyone, everywhere to give it a try.

Let’s Hear it for Root Vegetables!

We’ve had the chance to get an assortment of root vegetables over the last few pickups of the 2013 season—beets, turnips, radishes, carrots, and some potatoes and onions there at the end. Root vegetables are delicious, nutritious, and very versatile. In fact, you may not realize how versatile they are, so here are some ideas.

Roast your beets and then dice them and freeze them to add to salads at the holidays. Such pretty color, and they are tasty, too. Scrub ’em, put them in a baking pan with a little water (about a quarter cup), cover with foil, and roast for 45 minutes. Then let them cool, peel them, and dice or slice them. Freeze them in small amounts in freezer bags.

Use turnips and potatoes along with some greens to make colcannon or champ. I made a delicious batch of this Irish specialty on Halloween—or Samhain—the traditional day to eat colcannon for luck (it was the old Druid new year’s celebration). Peel the potatoes and turnips and cut into quarters; put them in a pot of water and bring to a boil, then boil until tender, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, clean and devein some greens—chard, spinach, kale, cabbage, whatever you have—and chop into small pieces. You can throw the greens in with the potatoes and turnips for the last 10 minutes or so, then drain everything well. Add a little milk and a little butter and whip with a mixer until you have a fluffy light green concoction. Put it in a warm bowl and make a well in the middle to add more butter. Yummy!

Butter those radishes and eat them raw. It’s an English way to eat them, and especially if they are hot, the butter tempers the heat a bit. A great snack!

Make carrot soup. It’s tasty and it just looks like fall, that lovely orange color. There’s a great recipe for carrot soup in a previous blog. (And as a root vegetable bonus, the recipe can be adapted to make beet soup, too!

And, one more idea—take some carrots, onions, and turnips, and maybe some potatoes, too. Peel them and cook them a little; steam the carrots and turnips, boil the potatoes, sauté the onions. Then put them in ovenproof bowls, add some cooked chicken, pour on some gravy, and mix up some bisquick and make a top crust. Voila, a rich and delicious homemade chicken pot pie just bursting with root vegetable goodness!

What are you doing with your root vegetables?

Sunday at Paradise Featured Fun and Funds for Enright CSA

The end of 2013 season celebration and benefit for the Enright CSA was held at the Paradise Lounge, just four doors down from the greenhouse. The new management welcomed us, the weather was perfect, the music just right, the food was excellent, and a good time was had by all who attended. 

Thanks to all the committee who made the party possible; Alison and Jules who found the band, made the poster, and brought cornbread; Jim D. who cased the joint and organized the setup crew; Nancy who brought the giant pot of veggie chili; Diana and Jeanne who provided desserts and hostess items and helped clean up; Michelle who provided slaw and dessert and took tickets; Suellyn who coordinated and emceed the event; the grocers who sold tickets; and various folks who publicized the event and then fetched and carried to set up and take down.

Thanks are also due to Rock Riddlebarger, our member who entertained us on steel guitar and dobro and to Benchwood Wyse, the young, thoroughly professional band who played for two hours and seemed to love it. Special thanks to LaShon, Karen, and the rest of the staff at Paradise, and to Steve, the owner, who gave a significant donation so that his regular customers could enjoy the meal and then purchased the cornshock decorations to keep for his next event.

If you were not able to attend, you may still offer a donation for the benefit of the CSA to help balance the books at the end of the season. Just give it to the grocer at the next pick-up, being sure to designate it for the benefit.

--Suellyn Shupe

Add Some Color to Your Freezer

We’ve been getting a goodly number of peppers in shares recently, and there’s more on the share table if you are inclined to do some pepper preservation. Of course you can dry some hot peppers, like chiles, but I found out recently that it’s even easier to preserve sweet peppers and other kinds of hot peppers so you have them on hand for stews and chili as the weather gets colder. As it turns out, it’s a fairly easy process—you don’t have to can or even blanche peppers to keep them for use all winter long.

Wash the peppers, seed them, and cut them into strips. Then arrange the strips on wax paper-covered cookie sheets (as shown in the photo, I kept the strips segregated by color and hotness). Put them in the freezer uncovered, and when the strips are frozen, bag them in freezer bags and put them right back in the freezer. If you want, you can take out just what you need, or thaw a whole bag to add a little fire to a pot of chili.

Another vegetable that’s easy to freeze for future use is the beet. Beets are already about the most versatile vegetable around, great for anything from pickling to adding to chocolate cake or salad or . . . well, the list goes on and on (here's a great recipe for beet fritters and another one for beet or carrot soup). If you want to keep them on hand after the growing season, just roast them, then peel, dice or slice, and put them in freezer bags.

I roasted a dozen or so medium-sized beets in a Pyrex pan, adding about a ¼ cup of water and covering with foil before putting them in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes. Then, when they cooled, the skins slipped right off, and I diced them for salads, to add a little color when everything is grey and cold.

Now my freezer is a riot of color, with green, yellow, and red peppers stacked along side deep purple beets. It’s enough to remind me that spring will come again every time I open the freezer door!

Call It Chinese Celery

In the latest shares from the CSA, we've had a choice of bok choy or Chinese cabbage, which might have been confusing to some folks, because bok choy is sometimes called Chinese cabbage. But at the greenhouse, the two leafy vegetables available are Napa cabbage, also called Chinese cabbage, and bok choy, which apparently has the same nickname.

If I were in charge of vegetable nicknames, I would call bok choy Chinese celery. Though the leafy part is different, darker green with unserrated leaves, the stalks are quite like celery, and I’ve used it in the same ways in things like gazpacho this season. It really doesn’t seem much like cabbage to me at all, but whatever you call it, it is good in stir fry and soup.

Speaking of soup, a lot of my soup recipes begin with “pick the leftover meat off a roast chicken and then boil the bones for stock,” and my Hearty Chicken Bok Choy soup is one of them. I always figure on getting two or three meals out of a roast chicken; if you cover the bones with water and add a small peeled onion cut in half, a peeled carrot cut in half, and a celery rib (or bok choy stalk), some thyme, salt, and pepper, and a bay leaf, in an hour and a half you’ll have a nice pot of stock. Strain it, pick off any leftover meat still on the bones, cool the broth and skim the fat off, and then move on to the “real” recipe.

Hearty Chicken & Bok Choy Soup

Leftover meat from a roast chicken

5 or 6 cups of homemade chicken stock

2 cloves minced garlic

1 large onion, diced

1 bunch bok choy, leaves and stalks, chopped

6 small potatoes, peeled and sliced or diced

4 carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds

1 tablespoon olive oil

Salt, pepper, and herbs to taste

Put the olive oil in the bottom of a soup pot, heat, and add garlic and onion, cooking until soft but not brown, about 4 or 5 minutes. Add the bok choy, potatoes, and carrots, and toss with the onions until they are heated, 3 minutes or so. Then add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for about 10-15 minutes, until vegetables are beginning to get tender. Then add the chicken meat and whatever herbs sound good—a little thyme, some basil or a bit of pesto, maybe some diced hot pepper if you are so inclined. Continue to simmer until chicken is heated through and vegetables are fairly soft, another 10-15 minutes, and it’s ready.

Two Tickets to Paradise (It's a Fundraiser!)

The Enright Ridge EcoVillage CSA is having an end-of-the-season party and fundraiser on Sunday, October 20,  at the new and improved Paradise Lounge & Garden, located right down the street from the greenhouse at the corner of West Eighth and Enright Avenues. 

Price Hill oldtimers will remember the bar (formerly called the Lyon’s Den) as the place to gather after a football or baseball game. Historically, it was also a popular place to have lunch and a beer after visiting the graveyards nearby. But for this party, we promise no cemetery visits. Just plenty of good food, good music, games, and fun.

The Paradise Lounge is under new management, committed to being neighborhood-friendly, so we’re going to have a nice neighborhood gathering there, which we also hope will raise some funds to balance out the CSA budget as we wrap up this season.

Everyone is invited, so bring your friends and family to Paradise to enjoy music by local bands, a chili supper, local brews, cornhole, and other down-home games.  You can even make your own scarecrow!

It starts at 4:00 pm and goes until 8:00 pm (don’t worry, there’s a television for football fans to stay current with the Sunday games). 

Two can enjoy Paradise a little more cheaply than one; the cost is $20 per person and $35 per couple presale, and tickets will be on sale during pickup and after (from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm) on the next two Saturdays, October 12 and 19, at the greenhouse, 824 Enright Avenue.

If you buy tickets at the door on October 20, the price is $25 per person and $40 per couple. All proceeds support the Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage Community-Supported Agriculture project.

Your Recipe + Greens

I’m always looking for new ways to cook greens, but though there are many ways to prepare them, the list is not endless. So, I’ve developed a new system as this season begins to wind down. I’m adding greens to any recipe I think they will work with.

How does that work? Well, I’ve already made it a practice to cut up and add some kale or chard to any quiche or frittata I’m making. Wash the greens, chop or slice into thin slivers or small pieces, and add them to the pan before the egg mixture, and they are a great addition. (There’s a blog from 2012 called “Understanding Your Greens” that talks about different kinds of greens and how to use them.)

Baked beans work with lots of additions—I always put in plenty of chopped up green peppers, but next time I may try some chopped up greens, too. You can add them to macaroni and cheese, and definitely to mashed potatoes—adding steamed cabbage and mashing together with the potatoes creates a time-honored Irish dish called colcannon, which is traditional at this time of year, particularly at Samhain, the Celtic celebration that gave us Hallowe’en.

Greens are good in soups, too. You can add them to chicken soup or minestrone, and they aren’t bad in tomato soups either. Add them to broth soups toward the end of the cooking time; for tomato soup, homemade or store bought, steam the greens and then stir them in. There’s a recipe for an African soup or stew made from greens on this blog, and another simple but tasty Swiss Chard Soup with Cream Cheese Croutons that you can make in minutes.

This past week, I made Chicken and Dumplings, a good southern standard, but when I added the chicken to the broth, I also put in a bunch of kale, washed, stemmed and chopped. It tasted great and made the dish a little more healthy for us, too.

So, I encourage you to use your imagination. What recipes can benefit from the addition of greens, or other vegetables? You don’t always have to find a recipe that specifically uses what you have in your share—make dishes you often make and add greens.