Apples & Corn

The harvest on Saturday included apples and corn, both welcome. However, they weren't grown at the Enright CSA. We don't have any apple trees yet (but give us time); they were from an orchard in Bridgetown. And corn requires a lot of space, so maybe when we get some more growing space we can grown our own. But it's nice that we are able to support other local farms by buying some produce to add to the shares a few times a year.

I had some of the corn in a bean dip at a party at fellow CSA member Tina Michel's house on Saturday night, and I will admit to picking up the last kernels on my plate with my fingers when my tortilla chips were gone, it was so tasty. I noticed that another young CSA member enjoyed her corn straight from the cob. (Thanks for sharing that photo, Michael Frazier!) I had an apple for breakfast this morning, and it was great, too, crisp and sharply sweet.

It was altogether a beautiful share this week, with the first of the peppers (the purple peppers are almost too pretty to eat--almost), a tomato, and even an eggplant on the share table. I think it's been our most colorful share so far, and it made a feast for the eyes, set out for pickup (good job, team) even before we all took it home to cook up a few feasts for the table.

Do Chua: Asian Pickling, Part II

There’s a new Vietnamese restaurant down at Findlay Market that sells Bahn Mi (a French-Asian baguette sandwich), and one of the garnishes they use is a carrot and daikon radish pickle called Do Chua. Turns out it’s really easy to make at home, especially if you have a lot of daikon radishes from your CSA share.

This recipe makes about two cups of pickle (fits nicely into an applesauce jar). You can make more or less, but there should be more daikon than radish—the suggested ratio is 2:1. You need about 3 carrots and 6 to 8 daikon radishes, no more than 2 inches in diameter. The classic way is to peel them and cut them into matchsticks, but I'm here to tell you, it’s a pain in the neck to cut round things into matchsticks. Some recipes call for grating or shredding the peeled carrots and radishes, maybe even using a food processor, and I might try that next time.

After you make those nice little matchsticks, the next step is to put them in a bowl and sprinkle them with 1 teaspoon of salt and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Use your hands to knead the vegetables for about 3 minutes. This expels a lot of the water from the vegetables, and as they soften you’ll see a pool of liquid forming at the bottom of the bowl. You can stop kneading when you can bend a piece of daikon so that the ends touch but it doesn’t break. Then drain them in a colander and rinse under cold running water. Press out the extra water so the vegetables are as dry as possible, then pack them in a clean jar.

To make the brine, put about 1/2 cup warm water in a big 2-cup measuring cup or some other container with a pouring spout. Add 3/4 cup distilled white vinegar (or rice vinegar) and 3/8 cup sugar, then stir to dissolve the sugar. Pour the brine over the vegetables to cover. Let the vegetables marinate in the brine for at least 1 hour before eating. They will keep in the refrigerator for up to 4 weeks.

It's Kimchi, Not Land Mines: Asian Cold Pickling I

When I told my friend Barb, also a CSA member, that I had made kimchi (Korean sauerkraut, more or less), she reminded me that there was an episode of M*A*S*H in which the 4077th thought the locals were placing land mines around the hospital camp, but in fact they were burying jars of kimchi. Well, I decided for safety's sake I wouldn't bury my kimchi; I stored in the refrigerator. Turns out that in Korea, there are kimchi refrigerators now, just for storing this stuff. I think it's the national food.

I made my kimchi when the Chinese cabbage was coming in fast and furious a couple of weeks ago, and we finally got around to eating some tonight (it has to ferment). WOWSER! This is some hot stuff. It's pretty tasty, too; it reminded me of calamari, weirdly enough, but much, much hotter than any octopus I ever ate. It keeps for weeks, so you might see some at the next potluck. Take tiny bites!! If you want to try this at home, here's the recipe I used. (I found the fish sauce and chili paste in the Asian section of the local Bigg's store.)

Korean Kimchi

1 large Chinese cabbage
1 gallon water
1/2 cup coarse salt
1 small head of garlic, peeled and finely minced
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1/4 cup fish sauce
1/3 cup chili paste
1 bunch green onions, cut into 1-inch lengths, including the green part
1 medium daikon radish, peeled and grated
1 teaspoon sugar or honey

Slice the cabbage lengthwise in half, then slice each half lengthwise into 3 strips. Cut away as much of the tough stems as you can. Then dissolve the salt in the water in a very large container and submerge the cabbage under the water. Put a plate (or a pot of water, which is what I used) on top to make sure they stay under water and let stand for 2 hours.
Mix the other ingredients in a very large metal or glass bowl. Drain the cabbage, rinse it, and squeeze it dry. Now mix it all up. You might want to wear rubber gloves if you use your hands, but a really large spoon works, too. Pack the kimchi in a clean glass jar large enough to hold it all and cover it tightly. Let stand for one to two days in a cool place, around room temperature. Check the kimchi after 1-2 days. If it’s bubbling a bit, it’s ready and should be refrigerated. If not, let it stand another day, when it should be ready. Once it’s fermenting, serve or store in the refrigerator. Eat the kimchi within 3 or 4 weeks, or it can get too fermented. Unless you bury it in the backyard, I guess . . .

A Gift from the Compost Pile

As if you need another reason to compost, besides keeping stuff out of the landfill (or in the sewer system if you have a garbage disposal) and creating nice, nutrient-rich soil to grow more good stuff, how about these apples? I mean, squash!

Mike found this big, ripe acorn squash in our compost pile this morning. I've seen volunteer tomatoes in compost before, but this is the first gift squash I've encountered. We're going to enjoy eating it roasted with a little butter and salt and pepper. And we didn't have to do a thing to get it, except throw the kitchen scraps (including the seeds from an acorn squash last year, obviously), onto the compost pile back on the old overgrown patio. Free food! What could be better . . .

Bread and Butter Pickles

I've been preserving by some of the produce from the CSA this weekend by pickling. I'll report in a few days on my success with Asian cold pickling, but for now here is an old and easy recipe for bread and butter pickles. It requires canning jars, lids, and rings, but you just process them in an open hot water bath (that is, a big pot full of boiling water), so if you have a spaghetti pot, that and a few Mason or Ball jars is all you need in the way of "special equipment" for this canning project. And that's just if you want them to last for months. If you're making less (say half the recipe) and you plan to refrigerate it and eat the pickles in a couple of weeks, you don't even have to process them. Just pack them in a clean and sterile glass jar that used to have something else in it (pour almost boiling water in the glass jar and let it sit for 15 minutes or so to sterilize the clean jar). Bread and butter pickles turn an outlandish electric yellowy color (from the turmeric, which is also a preservative) that make them look like they are from outer space, or perhaps just radioactive, but they are really delicious.

Bread and Butter Pickles

1 qt sliced cucumbers
1 1/2 cups sliced white onions
1/2 cup sliced green peppers
1 clove garlic
1 1/2 tsp pickling or kosher (coarse) salt

1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup distilled vinegar
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/2 tsp. celery seeds
1/2 tsp. mustard seeds

Combine the cucumbers, onions, green peppers, and whole garlic clove in a glass pan or bowl. Add the salt and cover with crushed ice. Mix thoroughly. Let stand for three hours in the refrigerator, then drain well. Discard the garlic and put the rest of the vegetables in a large pan. Combine the remaining ingredients, pour over cucumber mixture, and bring to a boil. Fill hot jars with the vegetables and brine to 1/2" from the top of the jars, put on the lids and rings, and then process in boiling water bath for 5 minutes.

Contact Team Leaders for Work Hours at the CSA

We are nearing the halfway point in the CSA season, and we wanted to remind members that if you need to catch up on CSA work hours, you can contact the team leaders listed below to plan some time to work. If you haven’t signed up for any teams yet, contact any of the team leaders to sign up now. You can also ask them any questions you have about the work the various teams do at the Enright Ridge CSA.

TEAM LEADERS
Communications Team: Beth Andriacco, eandriacco@gmail.com
Compost & Soil Management Team, Bill Cahalan, earthawaken2@yahoo.com
Crop Care & Pest Management Team: Deborah Jordan, djordan@fuse.net
Finance & Funding Team: Jim Schenk, jschenk@imagoearth.org
Greenhouse Care Team: Karen Graves, karengraves99@gmail.com
Harvest Team: Christine Boatwright, thou_art_loosed@yahoo.com
Membership Team: Leeann Garrett, leeann.garrett@gmail.com
Outreach Education Team: Dave Hill, davidghill2003@yahoo.com
Packout Team: Angie Utley, packoutteam@gmail.com
Seeding & Transplant Team: Michelle Savoti, michelle.savoti@cincinnatilibrary.org
Social Team: Beth Brubacher, bbrubacher@zoomtown.com

In addition to these member-led teams, the Propagation Team, Soil Bed Preparation Team, and Irrigation Team are currently headed by the farm staff members:

Charles Griffin, cgriffinrising@gmail.com
Rudy Rudemiller, drudemil@hotmail.com
Dave Hill, davidghill2003@yahoo.com

The Enright Ridge CSA takes more than 5,000 hours of work each year to plan, promote, sow, harvest, care for, and distribute the produce we get each Saturday morning. Please contact a team leader and starting contributing your share of the work soon.

Food Preserving Classes at the Civic Garden Center

I thought CSA folks might be interested in some of the upcoming classes offered at the Civic Garden Center (on Reading Road in Mt. Auburn). The classes in preserving the harvest, by canning, freezing, drying, pickling, and preserving, might come in particularly handy as the shares continue to grow. Unless otherwise listed, classes are $10/person (free if you are a Civic Garden Center volunteer). To learn more or register, visit the CGC website.

Plant Your Own Salad Garden
Saturday, July 23, 10:30-Noon, 1-2:30 $5/participant, kid-focused

Preserving the Harvest: Water Bath Canning
Wednesday, July 20, 6 - 8 pm

Simple Solutions to Stormwater Management Tour
Tuesday, July 26, 6 - 7 pm (FREE)

Munch Your Way Through the Garden
Saturday, July 30, 10:30 -11:30 am
$5/child, geared for kids aged 18 months to 6 years

Fall Vegetable Gardening
Wednesday, August 3, 6 - 8 pm

Backyard Composting
Saturday, August 6, 10 to Noon

Preserving the Harvest: Pressure Canning
Wednesday, August 10, 6 - 8 pm

Food Preservation Methods: Freezing, Drying, Pickling and Fermenting
Wednesday, August 17, 6 - 8 pm

Potluck in Paris (Sort of) on Thursday, July 14

I just knew that we might get unexpected results if we piled compost around that old air-conditioning unit at the greenhouse . . . but at least this is a good reminder of our next potluck, coming up on Thursday, July 14, Bastille Day. We’ll celebrate all things French for the occasion, with French food (we hope) at dinner, scheduled for 6:00 pm. Then we’ll have a meeting, conducted entirely en francais (just kidding) at 7:00 pm.
Please join us—we’d like to hear from team leaders how things are going in the gardens, and we’d really like to get anyone who’s not signed up for a team set up with one at the meeting. We'd also like to get just a few more CSA members as we approach mid-season, so if you have a friend or relative who has shown some interest in the farm, please bring them along.

The weather forecast indicates that it won’t be as hot as it’s been the past few days, so we can enjoy the food on the picnic tables outside as we practice our French declensions. (Kidding again.) And it's not really in Paris; it's at Imago, as usual, which is at 700 Enright Avenue in the Ecovillage, if you haven’t been to a potluck before. And if you haven’t, why not? Please join us on Thursday!

Snapping Beans

I was sitting on the back porch this evening snapping green beans, prepartory to blanching them and freezing them. They were certainly nice-looking beans, and we got so many of them that I wanted to freeze the ones we wouldn't eat this week while they were still fresh. Even though they were picked on Friday, they still looked very fresh on Tuesday. I imagine some green beans you get at the store take a lot longer than four days just to travel from field to store, so I was happy to get these beans frozen while they were still so fresh.
Anyway, I got to thinking about the many, many green beans I snapped sitting on my great-grandmother's back porch. She didn't live in some old Victorian with a big back porch; she lived in a modern brick two-family with a glass-enclosed porch, but that's still where I sat when I snapped beans, right on the back stoop between the dining room and the porch. When I was done, she'd cook the living daylights out of them. (I like them a little more al dente these days.)
When I went down with a few bags of beans to put in the basement freezer, I found I still had a bag of corn and one of chopped green peppers from last season. I believe that's all that is left, except for half a jar of green tomato chutney in the refrigerator. I believe I'll make some succotash from that corn and the green peppers. Which reminds me of my Grandma Alice . . . but that's another story.

It’s Not Easy Eating Greens

No, I’m not talking about how roughage might affect one’s digestive tract. I merely mean that it’s not easy finding enough different ways to serve greens in one week when greens are really in season at the CSA. We have a new motto at our house, “A meal without greens is . . . breakfast. Maybe.”

I like greens; I have always enjoyed salads, and cooked greens used to be a special treat when we’d go to a good barbecue restaurant. But now I know that I had barely touched the surface of what you can do with greens.

In the last week or so, we have had . . .

-5-Lettuce Salad with Basil Vinaigrette
-Polenta with Greens, Baked Eggs, and Cheese
-Thunder Bay Salad, made with Chinese Cabbage
-Potato Fry-Up with Summer Greens
-Greens Soup with Cream Cheese Croutons
-Kale Sauteed with Tomatoes, Peppers, and Onions
-Mixed Greens with Basalmic Vinegar
-Pineapple Chicken Stir Fry with Chard

So far, I have not come up with a dessert recipe that uses greens, but give me time and more greens, and it may happen!

If anyone has some good ideas—and especially recipes—to use greens, we’d like to share them on the blog. Send them to the Committee Team Leader to post or bring them to the next potluck or to packout on a Saturday. As the summer moves on, we’ll be getting other vegetables instead of greens, but they’ll be back when the weather cools off in fall and we need to be prepared!

Packout Scones

A few people have requested the recipe for the scones that were at the greenhouse during packout last Saturday. They weren't made with any of the produce from the farm this time, although they are also tasty with a dollop of pear butter made from the pears from the Schenk's yard. Here's the recipe.

SCONES

2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold butter (or margarine)
2/3 cup buttermilk (or put a tablespoon of lemon juice in measuring cup and then add milk to 2/3 cup)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
dried fruit, nuts, or jam (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. It's quicker to mix the dough in a food processor, but you can cut in the butter with the dry ingredients by hand with two knives--that's the first step, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and butter (cut into smaller pieces) until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the vanilla to the buttermilk and then add all the liquid slowly to flour mixture until it forms a stiff dough (you might not need all of the liquid). At this point, mix in dried fruit or nuts if you want, then turn out dough on floured surface and form a round about 8" in diameter and an inch or more thick. (For more smaller scones, make two rounds, smaller in diameter but still about an inch thick, and cut each one ito six wedges.) Cut into eight wedges, and arrange them on a double cookie sheet lined with wax paper (that is, put one cookie sheet inside another and put wax paper on the top cookie sheet; this keeps the bottoms from burning while the tops brown). Mix the egg and milk together and brush the tops of the scones with the egg mixture. If you haven't put dried fruit or nuts in the dough, at this point you can make an indentation with the back of a spoon in the wide part of each wedge and then put a teaspoon of preserves, jam, or apple butter in the indentation. Then bake for 20 minutes, cool, and eat.

On Farming & Revolution

On Fourth of July, I always think about the men in the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence. I knew them all well. And no, I’m not nuts or channeling past lives—the theatre group I was in put on the first amateur production of the musical 1776, and after two months of rehearsals, fittings for about 27 frock coats, and numerous performances, I still feel like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Hewes, John Hancock, Robert Livingston, John Dickinson, and the rest of them were my friends. Probably because they were, at least in their musical theatre incarnations . . .

Historically, I know a lot of them were farmers and plantation owners, but they were all what you might call “gentlemen farmers.” Whilst they were in Philadelphia, other people were tending their fields and farms back home. In Braintree, Massachusetts, Abigail Adams kept the small family farm going while John was away (I know because she told me so herself when I was hemming her dress); Thomas Jefferson, with Ben Franklin’s help, tried mightily though unsuccessfully to have slavery outlawed in the Declaration, but Jefferson’s own slaves kept his plantation at Monticello running while he was gone, including tending his gardens, where he experimented with heirloom seeds and organic growing methods more than 200 years before we thought about it.

Now, I’m finally getting to my point in this Independence Day post: we have a few gentlemen farmers in the CSA. They pay for a nonwork share, and we’re happy to have them, because they definitely help pay the bills. However, the majority of our shares are work shares, and a few of those work share owners haven’t picked up a hoe yet. So, this is a gentle reminder that our Urban Farm Revolution needs the help of every share member. If you are reading this blog, you’re probably already an involved member of the Enright CSA, but if you know any members who haven’t signed up for a work team or two yet, please encourage them to take a little time this week to do so.

Our CSA is part of a local food revolution, and we each have dedicated ourselves to the proposition that we must help water, weed, write, count, clean, packout, plan, plant, hoe, and harvest. Tell any friends who haven’t started putting work hours in yet not to wait too long or they’ll have a lot of time to log and not too many weeks to do so. They need to put their John Hancocks on a team signup list today. Email farm@pricehill.org if you specifically need a list of team leaders and their email addresses.

Happy Fourth of July, and remember what Mother Jones said: “We need to raise less corn and more hell.” We can raise hell with the status quo in America’s food production methods by raising our own corn, beans, greens, tomatoes, and more—each and every one of us. I think I hear the Liberty Bell tolling for us now . . .