Second issue free: the Broadsheet -- zine of Broadacre Farm
The Broadsheet is free to CSA sharers of Broadacre Farm. This second issue is free for anyone to explore ideas in local food, Midwestern terroir, and the launch of Broadacre's first ever CSA, with shares delivered June 26, 2014. Sixteen-plus future issues! Published June-October.
what's in your share / what's in season
fruit rhubarb*
herb mountain mint+
herb dill
herb bee balm+
herb Thai holy basil
vegetable Egyptian walking onion
greens Blushed Butter Oak lettuce
greens Salad of the Seasons Mix+ (stellaria tips, baby lambsquarter, red clover blossoms, baby leaves of beets, lettuce, chard, kale, radish, spinach; ox-eye daisy leaves, wood sorrel leaves and flowers, sugar pea shoots, snow pea shoots)
greens young grape leaves+
mushroom coral fungus+
mushroom dryad's saddle mushroom+
* Special delivery.
+ Wild foraged.
Quick Picks
Rhubarbade Rhubarb + sugar, water
Rosy red rhubarb Rhubarb + Jello, flour, butter (cooks.com)
Rhubarb chutney Rhubarb, onion + bacon fat, raisins, coriander, lemon zest, smoked salt
Dolmas - Young grape leaves, dill, mountain mint, Egyptian walking onion + rice or farro, lemon
Mushroom tapenade - Mushrooms, Egyptian walking onion + hazelnuts, dried fig
Vinaigrette -
BLTs - Blushed Butter Oak lettuce and Rhubarb Chutney + tomato, pastured bacon, bread
+ Dill-Mint Chimmichurri Sauce -- basil, onion, dill, mint + garlic, parsley, olive oil, lemon zest (marthastewart.com)
Rhubarb - Joe and I harvested what we felt was a massive amount of rhubarb last week to see that volume end up as seven or nine stalks. Not so this time, with an assist from a neighbor and fellow gardener Cari, who offered her surplus stalks to Broadacre's CSA if the share felt light. Writing this Tuesday, I hope you enjoy the abundance.
Last week, I heard from folks who made rhubarb crisp, rhubarb-bee balm sauce, and in our kitchen, a rhubarb chutney sweetened with Zante currants (which are actually dried champagne grapes and very sweet). A surprisingly recommended recipe that vibrates with Midwestern-ness is Rosy Red Rhubarb, where one prepares a quickbread cake with lots of butter, then sprinkles a packet of strawberry Jello mix over the top. Truly 80s.
Mountain mint - Mountain mint isn't your ordinary mint. Preferring more sunny arid slopes rather than gardens, it grows in loose colonies that are easy to find because last year's gray stalks and seedheads persist over the seasons. It's an almost medicinal scented mint, very suited to tea, but this mint is sort of calling out for ice cream, preferably a vanilla with the seeds in it, although the flavor could hold up well in a dark chocolate ice cream a la Andes mint candies. The more versatile route is a simple syrup you could pour over whichever desserts. All syrups keep well frozen or can be boiling-water canned. The ratio is 1 part sugar to 1 part water for concentrated shelf-stable syrup; for shorter timespans, use 1 part sugar, 2 parts water.
+ A pretty thorough primer on mountain mint: Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum (hubpages.com)
Dill - Already tried freezing into ice cubes and ready for something else? Try infusing vodka with dill for a special Bloody Mary.
+ Joe shares this link about 15 Times Dill Stole the Show, and says #1 is Grape Leaf Pilaf. (huffingtonpost.com)
Bee balm - We had folks try bee balm in their tomato-based pasta sauce, combined with rhubarb for a sweet-savory sauce, chopped and mixed with butter on crackers, as part of the spices for Lebanese meatballs. Terribly fine work you've all done. This is the last for the season if we still want to get any of perhaps my singular favorite wild flavor - bee balm petals.
+ A couple more recipes: Bee Balm Fruit Salad and Pork Fillets with Bergamot Sauce (backyardpatch.blogspot.com)
Thai holy basil - First basil of the season! A mere sprig, but would you get a load of that full-on anise-basil scent? It's intoxicating. It's the key ingredient in Twin Cities-based Sawatdee's holy basil supreme (which, considering the mushroom factor, could be made at home this week). There are three more flavors of basil on the way.
+ Supenn Harrison's original recipe for: Holy Basil Supreme (minnesotashowcase.com)
+ Or cross-reference that with Urban Herb School's stellaria based recipe for: Chickweed Pesto (urbanherbschool.ca)
Egyptian walking onion - This is the succulent flower stalk and out-of-control bulbils of a perennial onion. This entire vegetable can be eaten any time of year, and it's often the first up in spring. We chose to keep the bulbs alive in the hopes of a fall harvest. Bonus for gardeners and kids: You can split off the living bulbils and start your own patch of onions.
+ I was talking with a sharer who seemed surprised that this was a perennial onion, or that onions can be perennial. Your onions were from our original clump, purchased years ago at a community garden sale, and we've since been adding our stock and starting perennial onion colonies around the entire garden site. As for the shares, n a perfect world, we would be able to have onions every week. And indeed, that's the goal. One way to have onions more frequently is not to kill the plant and look for two or three harvests per species per season. That way, in that perfect world future, we can serve one week of chives, one week of Egyptian walking onion shoots, one week of chive flowers, and so on through annual favorites like cippolini and Walla Walla sweets (which I will admit haven't been my best crop). Next on the list of perennial alliums to explore on a much larger level in Broadacre Farm's 30 acres of rich bottomlands: Ramps.
Blushed Butter Oak lettuce - We heard from you that this half-oak, half-butter Bibb was a quality lettuce, and we agree. That is, when our refrigeration equipment isn't working to freeze them in the middle of the night! I carefully stripped off the blackened or translucent leaves that had been museum-worthy hours before, and hoped for the best that the quality would last a few more hours. We're trying again with this delicate lettuce and hope for your feedback.
Salad of the Seasons Mix - Talk about lessons learned. As a weekly item, I wasn't truly honest with myself about how much work it would be to put together a half-wild, half-farmed salad mix. Barring all must-cook greens, relying on plentiful edible flowers and wild greens, avoiding excessively large leaves - it all adds up to a labor intensive process. But the reward will be there this week, with sample baby leaves coming on, the best baby lambsquarter leaves I've tasted, and the red clover blossoms we were all meant to have instead of a pittance of petals.
+ Salad, or soup? Imagined and packaged as a salad, but you don't have to use it that way. Eager to experiment, I'm going to make my own chilled Soup of the Seasons (a chilled, raw soup made in a blender) because some amazing person gave a Vita-Mix as a recent birthday present. Until that recipe is ready, you can ogle this stellaria-based soup, as another name for stellaria is chickweed. As for ingredients, just substitute any fresh herb for the stinging nettles: Chickweed Soup (bloomsandfood.com)
+ Urban Herb School used Thai basil with stellaria to make: Chickweed Pesto (urbanherbschool.ca)
Young grape leaves - Dolmas! ("Fresh grape leaves elevate dolmas", pressdemocrat.com) There are variations on the theme, but it doesn't look like grape leaves are a worldwide phenomenon. However, we have all the makings of a Mediterranean feast whether it takes place in perfectly rolled orbs of grape leaf, or chopped into a casserole.
+ Additional instructions for using the young grape leaves includes cutting the main five ribs to better roll them, and a quick boil in salty-vinegary water is an easy way to approximate jarred grape leaves (simply because they are not usually available so fresh).
+ For sharers who have been trying to put more fish on the menu: Trout Grilled in Grape Leaves (primalgrill.org)
+ This is the recipe I use to pickle grape leaves (except I throw in a slice of preserved lemon): Preserved Grape Leaves (honest-food.net)
+ Better research makes a difference when I'm wrong about worldwide phenomena: Grape leaves figure into "Greek, Vietnamese, Turkish, and Romanian cuisines". Nutrition info at the link, too. (sfgate.com)
+ This recipe for Grape Leaf Pilaf is more along the lines of the freeform casserole-style dish that I would try after not being nimble enough to roll my own dolmas. I prefer to use pumpkinseeds toasted in a cast iron pan over pine nuts -- most pine nuts are imported from China and some pine nuts reportedly cause 'pine nut mouth', where you lose your sense of taste for a month. No thanks! We grow Kakai Hullless pumpkins for their naked seeds. Anyway: Grape Leaf Pilaf (food52.com)
+ Sally Fallon's recipe for lacto-fermented grape leaves. Get pickled at the link: (herbangardener.com)
Coral fungus - A two mushroom share! This fungus prefers old logs and branches that are flush with the ground and have really been in profusion due to the rain. Singularly, all you get is earthy mushroom scent. But when bagged alogether, you get a resonance of citrus, too. I've enjoyed this in a mushroom hash with dryad's saddle mushroom. This is a showier mushroom, and it doesn't really hold up to the rigors of long cooking, as it doesn't hold the unusual shape. Cook this mushroom, don't drink alcohol with it the first time, and I can't wait to see what you do with it.
+ I retained the sometimes-woody end piece of the mushroom so that they handled, washed, and used more easily in the kitchen. The single stem can be helpful when swishing in water to clean.
+ The coral fungus we saved to eat ourselves was also one we washed to see how washing affected quality. Bottom line? It was terrible -- sodden, clumped together, it took ages to drain into copious paper towels, and the humid environment needed to . Their unusual habit of forming upward 'antlers' means debris can fall in, but also that rain washes it out.
+ For our personal piece, leaving it out on the counter to dry changed the scent, and perhaps the flavor. First, it was a pure earthy mushroom smell, while Friday afternoon it is very much a citrusy-peppery aroma. I can't wait to cook this mushroom in some butter to see how the flavor transforms. However, our piece also was out of refrigeration for more than six hours and it didn't look appealing after that. So, a more perishable mushroom you could take out to breathe a few hours before supper.
+ More recipes, ID, preparation, and pickling tips from this link to: Coral Mushrooms / Clavaria (foragerchef.com)
Dryad's saddle mushroom - Quite certainly the last dryad's saddle mushroom for the season. These mushrooms smell like watermelon raw, but take on earthy tones when sliced thinly and fried. The most important thing here is - slice off the pore layer (spongey webbing) before cooking. Only the white cap layer and upper skin is eaten - the stem and pore layer are discarded.
The story of last week I was saying it throughout the day, and it should be said again: Everything went wrong but the food. Despite the best efforts of Joe, myself, and a helpful volunteer, last Wednesday's harvest-wash-pack day was a disaster.
The plan was to harvest-wash-pack all on site. This plan slid into domino collapse for a lot of reasons: The rain broke the generator, the fridge wasn't secure against the elements, and every fiber nearby was wet.
For this week's drop, we had two days of harvest instead of one, less commuting, and more sleeping (some of it after the alarm clock). Yes, the weather was drier,too. We washed and packed the shares at our home, while working on building our infrastructure at the farm.
Not ready this week Wild elderflower, blackcaps
Preview of next weeks Elderflower, blackcap raspberries, Easter Egg radishes, garlic chives …
- Barrett Johanneson
what's in your share / what's in season
fruit rhubarb*
herb mountain mint+
herb dill
herb bee balm+
herb Thai holy basil
vegetable Egyptian walking onion
greens Blushed Butter Oak lettuce
greens Salad of the Seasons Mix+ (stellaria tips, baby lambsquarter, red clover blossoms, baby leaves of beets, lettuce, chard, kale, radish, spinach; ox-eye daisy leaves, wood sorrel leaves and flowers, sugar pea shoots, snow pea shoots)
greens young grape leaves+
mushroom coral fungus+
mushroom dryad's saddle mushroom+
* Special delivery.
+ Wild foraged.
Quick Picks
Rhubarbade Rhubarb + sugar, water
Rosy red rhubarb Rhubarb + Jello, flour, butter (cooks.com)
Rhubarb chutney Rhubarb, onion + bacon fat, raisins, coriander, lemon zest, smoked salt
Dolmas - Young grape leaves, dill, mountain mint, Egyptian walking onion + rice or farro, lemon
Mushroom tapenade - Mushrooms, Egyptian walking onion + hazelnuts, dried fig
Vinaigrette -
BLTs - Blushed Butter Oak lettuce and Rhubarb Chutney + tomato, pastured bacon, bread
+ Dill-Mint Chimmichurri Sauce -- basil, onion, dill, mint + garlic, parsley, olive oil, lemon zest (marthastewart.com)
Rhubarb - Joe and I harvested what we felt was a massive amount of rhubarb last week to see that volume end up as seven or nine stalks. Not so this time, with an assist from a neighbor and fellow gardener Cari, who offered her surplus stalks to Broadacre's CSA if the share felt light. Writing this Tuesday, I hope you enjoy the abundance.
Last week, I heard from folks who made rhubarb crisp, rhubarb-bee balm sauce, and in our kitchen, a rhubarb chutney sweetened with Zante currants (which are actually dried champagne grapes and very sweet). A surprisingly recommended recipe that vibrates with Midwestern-ness is Rosy Red Rhubarb, where one prepares a quickbread cake with lots of butter, then sprinkles a packet of strawberry Jello mix over the top. Truly 80s.
Mountain mint - Mountain mint isn't your ordinary mint. Preferring more sunny arid slopes rather than gardens, it grows in loose colonies that are easy to find because last year's gray stalks and seedheads persist over the seasons. It's an almost medicinal scented mint, very suited to tea, but this mint is sort of calling out for ice cream, preferably a vanilla with the seeds in it, although the flavor could hold up well in a dark chocolate ice cream a la Andes mint candies. The more versatile route is a simple syrup you could pour over whichever desserts. All syrups keep well frozen or can be boiling-water canned. The ratio is 1 part sugar to 1 part water for concentrated shelf-stable syrup; for shorter timespans, use 1 part sugar, 2 parts water.
+ A pretty thorough primer on mountain mint: Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum (hubpages.com)
Dill - Already tried freezing into ice cubes and ready for something else? Try infusing vodka with dill for a special Bloody Mary.
+ Joe shares this link about 15 Times Dill Stole the Show, and says #1 is Grape Leaf Pilaf. (huffingtonpost.com)
Bee balm - We had folks try bee balm in their tomato-based pasta sauce, combined with rhubarb for a sweet-savory sauce, chopped and mixed with butter on crackers, as part of the spices for Lebanese meatballs. Terribly fine work you've all done. This is the last for the season if we still want to get any of perhaps my singular favorite wild flavor - bee balm petals.
+ A couple more recipes: Bee Balm Fruit Salad and Pork Fillets with Bergamot Sauce (backyardpatch.blogspot.com)
Thai holy basil - First basil of the season! A mere sprig, but would you get a load of that full-on anise-basil scent? It's intoxicating. It's the key ingredient in Twin Cities-based Sawatdee's holy basil supreme (which, considering the mushroom factor, could be made at home this week). There are three more flavors of basil on the way.
+ Supenn Harrison's original recipe for: Holy Basil Supreme (minnesotashowcase.com)
+ Or cross-reference that with Urban Herb School's stellaria based recipe for: Chickweed Pesto (urbanherbschool.ca)
Egyptian walking onion - This is the succulent flower stalk and out-of-control bulbils of a perennial onion. This entire vegetable can be eaten any time of year, and it's often the first up in spring. We chose to keep the bulbs alive in the hopes of a fall harvest. Bonus for gardeners and kids: You can split off the living bulbils and start your own patch of onions.
+ I was talking with a sharer who seemed surprised that this was a perennial onion, or that onions can be perennial. Your onions were from our original clump, purchased years ago at a community garden sale, and we've since been adding our stock and starting perennial onion colonies around the entire garden site. As for the shares, n a perfect world, we would be able to have onions every week. And indeed, that's the goal. One way to have onions more frequently is not to kill the plant and look for two or three harvests per species per season. That way, in that perfect world future, we can serve one week of chives, one week of Egyptian walking onion shoots, one week of chive flowers, and so on through annual favorites like cippolini and Walla Walla sweets (which I will admit haven't been my best crop). Next on the list of perennial alliums to explore on a much larger level in Broadacre Farm's 30 acres of rich bottomlands: Ramps.
Blushed Butter Oak lettuce - We heard from you that this half-oak, half-butter Bibb was a quality lettuce, and we agree. That is, when our refrigeration equipment isn't working to freeze them in the middle of the night! I carefully stripped off the blackened or translucent leaves that had been museum-worthy hours before, and hoped for the best that the quality would last a few more hours. We're trying again with this delicate lettuce and hope for your feedback.
Salad of the Seasons Mix - Talk about lessons learned. As a weekly item, I wasn't truly honest with myself about how much work it would be to put together a half-wild, half-farmed salad mix. Barring all must-cook greens, relying on plentiful edible flowers and wild greens, avoiding excessively large leaves - it all adds up to a labor intensive process. But the reward will be there this week, with sample baby leaves coming on, the best baby lambsquarter leaves I've tasted, and the red clover blossoms we were all meant to have instead of a pittance of petals.
+ Salad, or soup? Imagined and packaged as a salad, but you don't have to use it that way. Eager to experiment, I'm going to make my own chilled Soup of the Seasons (a chilled, raw soup made in a blender) because some amazing person gave a Vita-Mix as a recent birthday present. Until that recipe is ready, you can ogle this stellaria-based soup, as another name for stellaria is chickweed. As for ingredients, just substitute any fresh herb for the stinging nettles: Chickweed Soup (bloomsandfood.com)
+ Urban Herb School used Thai basil with stellaria to make: Chickweed Pesto (urbanherbschool.ca)
Young grape leaves - Dolmas! ("Fresh grape leaves elevate dolmas", pressdemocrat.com) There are variations on the theme, but it doesn't look like grape leaves are a worldwide phenomenon. However, we have all the makings of a Mediterranean feast whether it takes place in perfectly rolled orbs of grape leaf, or chopped into a casserole.
+ Additional instructions for using the young grape leaves includes cutting the main five ribs to better roll them, and a quick boil in salty-vinegary water is an easy way to approximate jarred grape leaves (simply because they are not usually available so fresh).
+ For sharers who have been trying to put more fish on the menu: Trout Grilled in Grape Leaves (primalgrill.org)
+ This is the recipe I use to pickle grape leaves (except I throw in a slice of preserved lemon): Preserved Grape Leaves (honest-food.net)
+ Better research makes a difference when I'm wrong about worldwide phenomena: Grape leaves figure into "Greek, Vietnamese, Turkish, and Romanian cuisines". Nutrition info at the link, too. (sfgate.com)
+ This recipe for Grape Leaf Pilaf is more along the lines of the freeform casserole-style dish that I would try after not being nimble enough to roll my own dolmas. I prefer to use pumpkinseeds toasted in a cast iron pan over pine nuts -- most pine nuts are imported from China and some pine nuts reportedly cause 'pine nut mouth', where you lose your sense of taste for a month. No thanks! We grow Kakai Hullless pumpkins for their naked seeds. Anyway: Grape Leaf Pilaf (food52.com)
+ Sally Fallon's recipe for lacto-fermented grape leaves. Get pickled at the link: (herbangardener.com)
Coral fungus - A two mushroom share! This fungus prefers old logs and branches that are flush with the ground and have really been in profusion due to the rain. Singularly, all you get is earthy mushroom scent. But when bagged alogether, you get a resonance of citrus, too. I've enjoyed this in a mushroom hash with dryad's saddle mushroom. This is a showier mushroom, and it doesn't really hold up to the rigors of long cooking, as it doesn't hold the unusual shape. Cook this mushroom, don't drink alcohol with it the first time, and I can't wait to see what you do with it.
+ I retained the sometimes-woody end piece of the mushroom so that they handled, washed, and used more easily in the kitchen. The single stem can be helpful when swishing in water to clean.
+ The coral fungus we saved to eat ourselves was also one we washed to see how washing affected quality. Bottom line? It was terrible -- sodden, clumped together, it took ages to drain into copious paper towels, and the humid environment needed to . Their unusual habit of forming upward 'antlers' means debris can fall in, but also that rain washes it out.
+ For our personal piece, leaving it out on the counter to dry changed the scent, and perhaps the flavor. First, it was a pure earthy mushroom smell, while Friday afternoon it is very much a citrusy-peppery aroma. I can't wait to cook this mushroom in some butter to see how the flavor transforms. However, our piece also was out of refrigeration for more than six hours and it didn't look appealing after that. So, a more perishable mushroom you could take out to breathe a few hours before supper.
+ More recipes, ID, preparation, and pickling tips from this link to: Coral Mushrooms / Clavaria (foragerchef.com)
Dryad's saddle mushroom - Quite certainly the last dryad's saddle mushroom for the season. These mushrooms smell like watermelon raw, but take on earthy tones when sliced thinly and fried. The most important thing here is - slice off the pore layer (spongey webbing) before cooking. Only the white cap layer and upper skin is eaten - the stem and pore layer are discarded.
The story of last week I was saying it throughout the day, and it should be said again: Everything went wrong but the food. Despite the best efforts of Joe, myself, and a helpful volunteer, last Wednesday's harvest-wash-pack day was a disaster.
The plan was to harvest-wash-pack all on site. This plan slid into domino collapse for a lot of reasons: The rain broke the generator, the fridge wasn't secure against the elements, and every fiber nearby was wet.
For this week's drop, we had two days of harvest instead of one, less commuting, and more sleeping (some of it after the alarm clock). Yes, the weather was drier,too. We washed and packed the shares at our home, while working on building our infrastructure at the farm.
Not ready this week Wild elderflower, blackcaps
Preview of next weeks Elderflower, blackcap raspberries, Easter Egg radishes, garlic chives …
- Barrett Johanneson