The Broadsheet - Broadacre Farm's 2014 CSA, Week Six- Vol. 1, Issue #6
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. Twelve-plus future issues! Published June-October.
what's in your share / what's in season
fruit wild berry mix: blackcap raspberries, wineberries, & wild raspberries+
fruit green and ripe gooseberries+
fruit Mesabi tart cherries
root Valentine's Day Mix radishes
Easter Egg radishes
Chinese Green Luobo radish
herb holy basil
spice bee balm petals+
vegetable Pea and bean mix: Sugar Anne snap peas, Rembrandt snow peas, &Tendergreen bush beans
vegetable early jalapeno
vegetable Egyptian onion aerial bulb
vegetable (Boothby Blonde cucumber, Dark Green Prolific zucchini, Mountain Pickling cucumber, Yellow Crookneck summer squash)
greens Salad of the Seasons Mix: Johnny's Encore Mix lettuce, Turtle Tree Seed lettuce mix, Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, Blushed Butter Oak lettuce, Pirat lettuce, Red Romaine lettuce, Winter Density lettuce, daylily blossoms+, radish flowers)
greens chicory leaves
+ Wild foraged.
Quick Picks
Purple pie Blackcaps, gooseberries, bee balm petals + elderflower, sugar, orange zest
Holy basil lemonade Holy basil + lemon, sugar
Stir fry Holy basil, early jalapeno, zucchini, radishes, onion, peas + mushroom, chicken, jasmine rice
Pasta al fresca Chicory leaves, onion + pasta, pork sausage
Bee balm butter or cream cheese Bee balm petals + butter or cream cheese
Infusables Wild berries, cherries, holy basil, or bee balm petals + sugar, vinegar, or alcohol
Berry mix
The cane berries are finishing their run in partly shaded edges, with discoveries of eight or nine berries on one branch getting fewer and farther between. Blackcaps are becoming scarcer. The wineberries - the red berries with the magenta blush and frosty 'bloom' - are so ripe on the bush that they are untransportable and are thus a trailside delicacy, especially for our dog Gemma who grazed beside us. This must have been the week last year when I invented 'purple pie', a catch-all berry pie (blackcaps and gooseberries, mostly, but supplemented with preserved garden huckleberries) with the last of the elderflowers and the first bee balm petals. Rosewater makes a great substitute for vanilla when you're using your own edible flowers, and orange zest still magnifies the blackcaps. Eventually, the crust was filled with fruit, sugar, and flowers, and the result was a pie that inspired this very CSA: Time-stamped with seasonality, and in a unit that was built from many tiny pieces otherwise ignored by our mainstream food system.
Mesabi tart cherries
Technically, these cherries are from Joe's folks' tree which we planted alongside them years ago, and we can now bring you a first taste of what Broadacre Farm will grow up to be - a world-class fruit producer with varieties you'll never see in a store, and have probably only ever eaten from a can, swimming in corn syrup. Want to make cherry tartlets or cherry clafoutis, but you reach for that cherry pitter no one has? Lifehacker.com's headline says it all: “Pit Cherries Cleanly and Easily with a Chopstick and a Bottle”.
Radish mix
As heat turns up the growth dial on radishes making them spicy, bolting (growers' word for when crops go to seed and lose flavor), and outright explosions alongside hollow centers, spongy texture, and woodiness. Biggest, prettiest, and last bunch until fall.
Holy basil
If you don't get to making your own Holy Basil Supreme, think about preserving some of the bounty by steeping this anise-flavored basil into liquid form. There are at least three good approaches: white wine or rice vinegar (shelf stable), vodka (shelf stable), or cold infused in olive oil (blanch 5 seconds, then puree with 1 cup oil; keeps a week chilled). As for drying, I've had better luck separating each leaf from the stem, rather than the bunch-hanging method - basil stems tend toward mold and basil leaves may wilt and blacken if left on stem. Store dried leaves whole
Bee balm petals
The star of the share, the overlooked spice of Midwestern meadows and forest edges, and the fireworks of mid-July. The flavor is really hard to describe, and tends to make me regard it as singular. The profile has notes of rosemary, thyme, sage, and bergamot. Easy routes include flavored butter (essential oils get carried in the butter), and if you're truly pressed for time, fill a jar with sugar and petals or submerge them in a vinegar or vodka for later.
Strong flavor - best used a pinch at a time.
Pea and bean mix
Finally, other peas and beans have come on. This is the end of the first planting of Sugar Anne, and the new 75 ft. bed has not started to produce yet. So I'm happy to include Tendergreen bush beans and Rembrandt snow peas this week. Each variety should increase in volume, then they'll be joined by loads of Sugar Anne snap peas, Burgundy bush beans, and Neckargold yellow beans. Any of these is good raw - remember your instinctual method for de-stringing some of these beans: Do you snap upward, or snap sideways catching any upper or lower string?
Early jalapeno
These are probably milder than the radishes, and at the same time, the more I include these early Early jalapenos, the more the plants will develop canopies to support the weight of the jalapenos that are coming. If you like real heat, wait for the serranos and Magnum habanero to start fruiting.
Egyptian onion aerial bulb
We served a version of this earlier: A whole 'treetop' of Egyptian walking onions. This is how large the aerial bulbs will grow if left to the onions own devices. What they lack in size they make up for in flavor, delivering a bracing onioniness that can flavor an entire dish even if it doesn't fill that same dish.
Vegetables in rotation
- Cucumbers, zucchini, and summer squash
Don't know if we are winning or losing the battle against striped cucumber beetles, but the effects are obvious: Plants at full-size producing one-or-two fruits per plant despite all we have done for them. However, this week there is even enough to go around, as last time we split the five glorious first vegetables with Minneapolis and gave the chanterelles to Wisconsinites. It felt like a fair compromise, and is a demonstration of what you might already know: Everything goes to CSA shares.
Salad of the Seasons Mix
The salad greens are coming on so strong that we abandoned the laborious stellaria tips in favor of traditional greens, plus added a favorite lettuce-y flower, the daylily.
Chicory leaves
No Greens of the the Season Mix (greens for cooking) this week, as insect pressure has bitten up so many leaves. Since people were asking for a ID and use breakdown on all these greens, we thought, 'Why not try one green at a time?' Chicory leaves have a bitter flavor profile, but a 1-2 minute blanch boosts palatability. Bitter flavors have a home in Italian and Thai cooking, where they form a balance with sweet, salty, and sour. Additionally, bitter vegetables are used in heavy meals, or after them - the bitterness acts like a digestive tonic that allows a diner to eat more, especially fats.
CSA Notes
+ Thanks to a generous Eau Claire sharer for the new-used fridge! With our now expanded fridge space, we'll make multiple harvests as well as harvest more produce, all of which will be fresher. Cheers.
+ We had a few requests to not include certain things in certain shares, and we are working to accommodate. If you know you aren't going to use an ingredient - or won't be around to use your entire share - let us know so we can adjust the shares.
Preview of next weeks Burgundy bush beans, Neckargold yellow beans, cilantro, parsley, Sichuan peppercorns, Purple Ruffles basil, & first tomatoes
- Barrett Johanneson