Get Involved with Organizing and Planning for Next Season

The Enright CSA Core Group is looking for increased participation from membership as we move through these transitional times.

Members of the CSA who participated in the 2012 season are invited to join the Core Group at their next meeting, Thursday, November 29, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Listed below are some of the teams that will be part of the CSA reorganization over the winter. If you are interested in getting involved, they would love to hear from you! Please contact Suellyn Shupe, suellyn7@yahoo.com, and let her know if you are interested, and if you will be able to attend the meeting. Please be sure to mention any specific interest and/or experience you can offer to any of the work groups listed here, or to the CSA in general.

1. Media Management
2. Online Services Team
3. Land Team
4. Transition Team
5. Farm Manager Hiring
6. Fundraising Team
7. Finances/Budget

How Did You Use CSA Vegetables for Thanksgiving?

I waited until we found out what was in last Saturday’s share before definitely deciding what I was going to make as side dishes for Thanksgiving. I made a roasted spiced squash dish that was quite tasty and a turnip, apple, and cheddar cheese gratin that everyone seemed to enjoy, and I had some green beans I blanched and froze earlier that I used for a green bean salad with some of the onions that were on the share table last Saturday.

My sister Amy, also a CSA member, made Bok Choy Stuffing that was absolutely delicious. I never would have thought of it—she used it as a substitute for celery—but now I won’t forget that idea next I have a recipe that calls for celery and I have some bok choy around.

I also tried a roasted vegetable salad that turned out pretty great last week. It didn’t make it to the Thanksgiving menu, but the recipe is below, simple and delicious.

Now, we’d also like to hear from other Enright CSA members (or anyone else who reads this blog)—what did you do with your locally grown produce this Thanksgiving?

Roasted Vegetable Salad
3 radishes, cut into chunks
4 small green tomatoes, cut into chunks
1 sweet pepper, seeded and cut into chunks
¼ cup seeds or nuts (pine nuts, almond or walnut pieces, or sunflower seeds)
Olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Grated Parmesan cheese
Lettuce and other greens
Dill, basil, oregano, thyme, or other herbs

Toss the cut up radishes, tomatoes, pepper, and seeds or nuts with a little olive oil and any of the herbs (dried or fresh chopped) that you have on hand. Spread the vegetables and seeds/nuts on a cookie tray and roast for about 15 to 20 minutes in a 400-degree oven (keep an eye on them and when the nuts start to brown everything should be ready). Take the roasted vegetables and seeds/nuts out of the oven and let them cool. Meanwhile, wash, dry, and tear up some lettuce and other interesting greens and add to salad bowl. Add the roasted vegetables and nuts or seeds, sprinkle liberally with Parmesan, and add a few dashes of red wine vinegar and about an additional capful of olive oil. Toss and serve.

Winter Vegetables Lend Themselves to an Ethnic Approach

Potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbage—these are all colder weather crops that we have in abundance this month. As it happened, I had dinner at a great Ethiopian restaurant that opened up on the outskirts of Price Hill a few months ago (Habesha on Crookshank, give it a try!) and eating there reminded me of just how much I really love Ethiopian food.

One of the dishes I had there was a concoction of cabbage and potatoes, and I went looking for a recipe when I found we had more cabbage and potatoes in the share this week. The recipe I found included carrots as well, and since I had quite a lot of turnips (and both my daughter and my mother-in-law declined to take any off my hands), I decided to adapt the recipe, as I am wont to do, to include a little more of what I had on hand.

This is a simple dish to prepare; it involves some peeling and chopping, but other than that it is fairly hands-off. It does take nearly an hour to cook, but the results are well worth it!

Ethiopian Cabbage Dish
¼ cup olive oil
4 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
1 onion, sliced
½ head cabbage, shredded (you can use Chinese or regular cabbage)
3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into ¾” chunks
3 medium turnips, peeled and cut into ¾” chunks
1 tsp. sea salt
¼ tsp. ground turmeric
½ tsp. ground cumin
½ tsp. ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat, then add the sliced carrots and onions and cook for about 5 minutes. Stir in the salt and spices and add the cabbage; cook for another 15 to 20 minutes until the cabbage is beginning to soften. Stir occasionally, turning the cabbage with a spatula. Add the potato and turnip chunks, reduce the heat to medium low, cover, and cook for about 20 to 25 more minutes, until the potatoes and turnips are fork-tender. Occasionally take off the lid and stir the vegetables around with the spatula as they cook. Makes about 4 to 5 servings. It smells great and tastes even better!

Put That Lemongrass in Some Spicy-Sweet-Sour Thai Soup

There was still lemongrass at the pickup this morning, and we’d already gotten some last week as well. I know there is a Thai restaurant on the east side called Lemongrass, so I figured Thai food was the thing to make to use some of this interesting stuff. I found a recipe for Tom Ka Gai (Thai Chicken Soup) and adapted it a bit to use some other produce I had on hand from the farm. It was quite tasty, and so I thought I’d share my “souped-up” soup recipe. Note that you can use turkey in place of chicken, so this might also come in handy after the Thanksgiving feast next week if you have any leftovers.

Tom Ka Gai
4-6 cups good quality chicken stock (or make your own turkey stock from bones)
1-2 cups cooked chicken or turkey
2 stalks lemongrass
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated, or 1 tsp. powdered ginger
1-2 fresh chile peppers (depending on size and how hot you want it), seeded and chopped
1 bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 celeraic root, peeled and chopped
1 can coconut milk
1 tsp. brown sugar
1-2 Tbsps. lime juice
1-2 Tbsps. Thai fish sauce (bottled and available at most grocery stores)
Handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped (or substitute dried basil)
Ground black pepper
Thai noodles

Slice and mince the lemongrass roots; discard the brown stalks but keep the green stalks and cut into about 6” pieces. Put the chicken stock in a large pot and add the minced lemongrass and the lemongrass stalks. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about 5 minutes. Add the cooked chicken, the basil, and the celeriac and continue to simmer another 5 minutes or so until chicken is thoroughly heated.

At this point, fish out the lemongrass stalks and discard them. Add the ginger, bell pepper, chopped chiles, brown sugar, and ½ can coconut milk and simmer for about 4 minutes. At this point, prepare the Thai noodles by placing them in a bowl and pouring boiling water over them to allow them to soften (takes about 5-7 minutes).

Add a tablespoon of lime juice, a tablespoon of fish sauce, and a sprinkling of ground pepper. Taste to see if the balance among salty, sweet, spicy, and sour suits you. If it doesn’t, add more fish sauce for salty, brown sugar for sweet, black pepper for spicy, or lime juice for sour. Add more coconut milk if you want it creamier. When the balance suits you, drain the noodles and place in the bottom of soup bowls, then ladle the soup over the noodles. Makes about 4 to 5 servings.

Thanks for all the great local food

It’s a little more than a week until Thanksgiving, but last night I gave some thanks in advance as I looked at dinner, which was entirely composed of food raised in Price Hill, except for the roast chicken. We had mixed lettuce salad with tomatoes and peppers, garlic mashed potatoes, and kale with carrot ribbons, all wonderful, all good for us (more or less), and all grown within a short bike ride of our house.

That’s surely something to be thankful for. But there will be a little more to be thankful for on Saturday, as we pick up our traditional (as far as a tradition can be set in four years) just-before-Thanksgiving share. I remember working packout for the day-before-Thanksgiving pickup a couple of years ago. It was a dark and stormy night, cold and wet and could have been miserable, but Amy Stross and I had a great time as CSA members came in on the way home from work and got fresh vegetables for their Thanksgiving feast the next day. It took hours to thaw out after that shift, but I still remember it very fondly—it provided a much more visceral connection to our food than if we had gone to a supermarket.

This year, the pre-Thanksgiving pickup will be on Saturday morning, and the weather report looks great, sunny and in the mid-50s. So I’ll be riding my bike to the greenhouse, and as I told my family earlier today, some of what I prepare for Thanksgiving dinner will depend on what we get in the share on Saturday. Squash? Sweet potatoes? Greens? I love them all, and whatever we get, it will be part of the feast, along with some green beans I blanched and froze earlier in the season, dried peppers, and anything else from the farm that I can work in.

Thanksgiving is just a little more “real” when you eat food from the Enright Ridge CSA. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Using What We Have, Dealing with Compost, and Spicy Piccallili

Over the weekend, I realized I still had quite a bit of produce from the Enright CSA in my crisper drawers. I made a list—turnips, burdock, potatoes, sweet potatoes, a little garlic, pumpkins, winter squash, hot peppers, pears, leeks, sweet peppers, green tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, celeriac, maybe a few other things that I should have used by now but still looked like they were in decent shape.

But I decided that something needed to be done. I improvised a goat cheese and leek tart with Jerusalem artichokes and mushrooms for dinner—it was delicious, I might add—and though I didn’t have enough pears to make pear butter this year, I remembered that they cooked nicely in the crockpot and made the whole house smell wonderful, so I threw them in the slow cooker, and a few hours later, served the stewed pears over custard for a delicious dessert. And I ate the leftover cooked pears for breakfast the next morning.

Then I took a mess of peppers, the green tomatoes, and a few tomatillas that had been forgotten but still looked perfectly serviceable, and I chopped them all up with an onion. I believe it would be called green tomato salsa these days, but in the olden days that my recipe came from (which I adapted a bit), it was called piccallili. I let it ripen overnight, salted and in the fridge, and will add the vinegar and process it in canning jars today to enjoy this winter when there are no shares of fresh produce coming in every week.

I had a lot of stuff for the compost pile when I was finished, and I knew it needed turning and there was some nice topsoil at the bottom ready to be harvested. That was a warm and messy job on a nice Sunday afternoon, and the dog helped. Not. But it’s done now, and the list of what I still have left to use is a little shorter. Word is there will be a limited pickup this Saturday, November 10—look for more details in an email to come. So I’d better get started thinking about ways to prepare some of the produce I still have in those crisper drawers.

I’m thinking pumpkin ravioli, maybe stuffed peppers, mashed turnips, baked sweet potatoes—not all at once, but over the next few days. If anyone has some brilliant ideas about how to use the burdock and celeriac, I’m interested in hearing about them. Leave a comment or send an email note (farm@pricehill.org).

Spicy Piccallili*
3 lbs. green tomatoes
3 or 4 (depending on size) green/yellow/white sweet peppers
4 jalapeno peppers
1 large onion
3 Tbsps. salt
1 pint cider vinegar
¼ cup sugar
1 tsp. peppercorns
1 tsp. celery seed
1 tsp. mustard seed
4 whole cloves

Chop the vegetables (chop the jalapenos very fine) and spread in a pan in layers, salting each layer. Cover and refrigerate overnight (at least 12 hours). Then drain well; press to get out additional liquid.

Heat the vinegar in a large pot and add the sugar and spices, then add the chopped vegetables. Bring to boiling point and simmer for about 5 minutes or so. Pack hot mixture in sterilized canning jars and seal. Process in hot water bath for 10 minutes. Makes about 3 pints.

*Adapted from a recipe that calls for a peck, or 12 pounds, of green tomatoes.