Beet Greens Beet Salad

I received a question from a CSA member this week about what to do with the various greens atop the various root vegetables you received this week. She also asked me for “my” beet salad recipe, which I am embarrassed to admit is really pretty much everyone’s beet salad recipe and not all that interesting. But in an attempt to get members – or anyone really – to participate in the blog, I’ll answer both questions here.

But first, a plea: send in your ideas for using our basket of vegetables. Ask other people to send in their ideas on how to use our basket of vegetables. Send people from other CSAs to our blog so we can get their ideas (and you can make them jealous with what a cool and caring CSA you belong to – one that is working so hard to see that you use every item to its utmost).

I especially need your help because, though I love to cook and love to try new recipes, at the time we are harvesting these vegetables, I am so busy, and we work so late into the evening (to avoid the 2 million degree heat during the day that I am avoiding right now) that most of the recipes I use sound like the ones below: “Just cook it in some bacon-fat and you’ve got a meal.” Let me know what those of you who have air-conditioning and the occasional summer evening free to cook are doing!

That said, the answer to the question is: Yes you can use beet greens and cook them like you would turnip greens or any of the other tougher greens (kale, collards, older spinach). If you are feeling healthy, cook them in some chicken broth for a really long time. If not, go with the old standby – chicken broth with bacon for a really long time. Or steam them in a little chicken broth (or just water), drain, chop, and sauté in bacon fat rendered when you cook up some bacon pieces. When they are done, sprinkle the bacon pieces back on. For a really nice pairing, throw in some blue cheese crumbles at the last minute (right before the bacon, so they melt a little, but not much). Yum.

As for carrot greens, I’ve never cooked them. Some claim you can; others claim they’re toxic – I’m waiting until the jury gets back in on that one.

And finally the beet salad, which is pictured above on the left in the medley of salads (spinach and filet bean salads being the other two). Twist off the beet greens (they will bleed less if you twist, not chop, them off, though they will still bleed some and stain the white shirt you accidently wore). Boil the beets (or roast them, but you’ll have to look up how to do this yourself) until fork tender (I find beets take about the same amount of time a potato takes to get to fork tender, and that obviously depends on size). Drain and cool (if you are in a hurry, you can run cool water on them to cool them). When you can handle them, slip the skinss off (another prime opportunity to stain hands and clothes) and trim the top and bottom. Cut into a large dice, or if they are small enough, as the ones in the picture are, leave them whole. Dress lightly with your favorite balsamic vinegar recipe – or use 1 part olive oil, 1 part walnut or other nut oil, one part balsamic vinegar, on part soy sauce. Plate atop a bed of salad greens (since you have them anyway) if you want, or leave just beet. Sprinkle with walnut halves and blue cheese crumbles.

June 22 CSA basket: What are you doing with yours?

So, what are you doing with your vegetable share this week? just as a reminder, we had:

• English peas
• Sugar snap peas
• Spinach
• Loose lettuce
• Carrots
• Beets and turnips
• Quail eggs
• I am entering my fourth consecutive week of “a spinach salad a day.” My favorite, pictured on the left, is spinach, onion, blue cheese , and apple with a balsamic vinegar dressing.
  
  I’m also making “Bertha’s Carrot Cake” from the Silver Palate cook books (I almost said from the “new” Silver Palate cookbook, but since I just noticed that “new” book had its 25 year anniversary printing, I guess I better come up with a better name). In any case you can view the recipe on Epicurious here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Mother-Bertas-Carrot-Cake-107118

I hope Phil will write in with the recipe for pickled quail eggs with beets. I heard him giving this out to someone at the Capitol Hill pick-up yesterday, but didn’t catch it all.

As we eat through what is definitely our last week of peas (both kinds – and remember, the ones with the green twist ties are ENGLISH and must be shelled and the ones with white or no ties are sugar snaps and must never be shelled) and could be our last week of spinach (until fall), I am reminded how local eating is a series of visits from favorite friends that end too soon (forgive the lapse into Hallmark sentiment). Good-bye sweet peas, hello blueberries. It slays me that I won’t get another handful of that crunchy sweetness until 2010 – but then again, I am looking forward to drowning my sorrow in a big face full of blueberry pie. Eat seasonally and experience (or re-experience) the emotional drama of a junior high girl.

Sarah's Fabulous Grilled Quail

Finally, here's a picture of the gorgeous quail CSA member Sarah Ducich made with Green Fence Farm Quail and our spinach. She writes:

This picture was taken on my blackberry, so it is a little blurry.It is Grilled Quail with Pancetta, Ricotta Pudding and Sicilian Breadcrumbs. The green is GFF spinach-yum! The recipe is from a cookbook Kate gave me for christmas a few years back, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques" by Suzanne Goin.

I found a link to an LA Times story that included this recipe, though I warn you it is full of annoying adds. I have a hard copy from another blog posting, but it is long and I didn't want to put it here, lest it take up all the space and you never get to the quail egg post next. The link is:

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/02/food/fo-goin2

What to do with Quail Eggs

This is soon to become a burning issue for our CSA members, as they are getting quail eggs in their basket this week. The eggs, as you can see from the picture, are about 1/5th the size of a regular chicken egg. They can be used in any way you use a regular chicken egg, but smaller. They are fun simply hard boiled and peeled (and possibly halved) in a salad – I’ve seen them soft boiled on fancy chef salads as well.

[To hard boil: Bring a pan of water to a light boil. Drop the eggs in for four minutes, then drain and transfer immediately to an ice water bath for at least five minutes. Peel when cold. The shell is surprisingly hard, so be ready for that.]

You can also use them in creative mini egg dishes like those pictured here in photos by CSA member and extraordinary chef, Phil Karsting.

One of my favorite quail egg recipes involves the use of the sort of greens we have around in early summer (also CSA staples): Spinach, Swiss chard (baby or not), beet, and turnip greens. This is modified from an egg and Swiss chard recipe from Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (linked above) – this book chronicles novelist Kingsolver’s family’s experiment with eating almost exclusively local for a year (they cheated on coffee, as would I). Since Kingsolver is from southern Virginia, many of the recipes and ideas in the book are perfect for our CSA members as well as anyone in the Mid-Atlantic area trying to eat seasonally and locally.

Quail Eggs in a Green Nest:

• Makes a side dish sized portion
• Count on one quail egg and one heaping handful of greens per person. Use any seasonal greens like Spinach, mizuna mustard, beet or turnip greens, and Swiss chard. In the fall you can substitute kale and collard greens with the same results.
• If you are using Swiss Chard, remove the leafy part from the stem. Do the same if you beet or turnip greens are large enough to have a thick central stem. Throw away the beet and turnip stems, but keep the chard ones. Wash the greens but don’t dry them (the same as in the Jaleo spinach recipe). Place them in a covered large pot over medium heat and let them cook down, stirring occasionally to get them to cook evenly). When fully wilted and cooked, drain and chop.
• While the greens are cooking down, add a tablespoon of olive oil (notice how all recipes call for “good quality olive oil” – well, I am sure this would be better with that, but I used crappy sale brand, and it worked just fine) per serving. Heat over a medium flame then, if you want, add some chopped garlic and/or finely chopped onion. For those of you in the CSA, you may want to chop your shallot flower and use it here. Sauté until the onions are translucent and the garlic smells good but is not crispy.
• If you saved chard stems, chop them now and add to the onions and garlic for about the last 5 minutes of their cooking.
• Add your pre-cooked and drained greens, season to taste, and continue sautéing for just a few minutes until the greens are warmed through and infused with the garlic and onions.
• Divide the green in the skillet into little piles (like nests), one for each serving. Turn the heat up a bit, make a hole in the nest and crack a quail egg in it. Let the egg fry for as long as it takes to get it the way you like fried eggs (we like the yolk runny so it mixes with the greens). Serve each little nest as side to quail, chicken, or any other fine Green Fence Farm meat product.
• [To make a full vegetarian meal out of this recipe, add cooked brown rice at the same time you add the chard stems. Divide into nests, but bigger nests than above. Use a chicken egg or several quail eggs as the center].

Happy 50th Birthday Nick!!

Today Nick finally reaches the age where he can, with some credibility, utter the phrase I hear from him every day on the farm, “I am way too old for this.” And even though he is, there would be no Green Fence Farm without him – he is its vision and the backbone, and it is his hard work and commitment to selling only the best quality products that is making this collection of broken down equipment and difficult to manage, allegedly domesticated animals into a model sustainable farm. He also doesn’t suck as a husband, dad, and friend. And though we love him for his poultry and produce, we mostly love him (or I do) for his loyalty, bombastic embrace of life, booming voice, and huge heart. Happy Birthday!

THE Spinach recipe from Jaleo

CSA member Lynn used her spinach this week to recreate my personal favorite tapas at Jaleos. The recipe is (I hope) linked above. I plan on making this when I get back to the farm tomorrow, but I am not sure about the status of the spinach beds. The farm is currently in the care of Nick and our son, Austin (who many of you know from the Shakespeare Theater). I tried to ask them to go and check out the spinach for me, but they are both very cranky and not taking phone requests. Seems our house roosters -- the ones we let run around the farm to eat bugs (and we "harvest" when they start trying to eat children instead) -- have taken up residence under our cabin, more specifically, under Austin's room. They start crowing at 3:30 AM. I find this very, very funny, which is why no one is checking my spinach for me.

What did you do with your CSA share this week

By the way, here's what your lettuce looked like before it came out of the ground -- the shadow is mine, and just above it, you can see one of my slug beer traps which, as you probably have realized by now, did not work nearly as well as one would have hoped.

This week, June 8th delivery, you got: spinach, loose lettuce, a head of lettuce, green onions, mizuna mustard, baby turnips, and sugar snap peas. Some of you also got Cornish game hens, quail, eggs, and John's bread.

I got most of the same things, and I mostly plan to eat salads (having consumed my share of sugar snap peas while picking -- and I still argue they are best raw, maybe with a little dip of some kind, but since mine never make it in the house, I can't vouch for that last statement). My favorite salad in the world is spinach, green onion, blue cheese, an apple, an avacado and a garlicy vinegrette or Paul Newman's balsamic dressing. When I run out of spinach, I go to the greens and do the same thing. I sure hope some of you have better ideas.

Here's my suggestions for the scary looking turnips and their greens again -- anyone try this?

Peel the turnips best you can and dice into about ½” squares. Chop some bacon and fry it until crisp. Remove the bacon and use the far to fry up the turnip dice. While it is cooking, wash (gotta wash everything from our farm – this will be obvious) the turnip greens and chop the top third or half. Throw these greens in with the turnips and sauté until the greens are tender. Serve warm with the bacon bits mixed back in. This is really good with steak on the barbeque ( a healthy alternative – except the bacon part – to potatoes).


You can also use the turnips and greens as part of a stir fry – replace the bacon with a mix of sesame and vegetable oil. Fry the turnips and greens in the oil as above. Add the mizuna mustard a minute or so after you add the turnip greens. Throw some spinach in if it looks skimpy. Then add whatever cooked meat you want in your stir fry along with a little soy sauce.

And if you got bread and eggs, a great breakfast, one my mom used to make, is called "spit in the eye" (and for those of you who know my mom, this is an odd recipe title for her to have grown fond of -- must have come from my saltier grandmother). Make a one inch or so hole in the middle of a slice of bread (and eat it to tide you over until you are done cooking), melt a slice of butter in a frying pan and heat to egg frying temp. Fry the bread for a bit (personal preference here -- I like the bread soft; Nick likes it crunchier). Break an egg into the hole, fry for a while (again, personal preference -- fry until the yolk is as hard as you like it in a fried egg). Flip the bread over and fry a minute longer.

So what are you doing with your loot? And please, even if you are not a CSA member, feel free to comment on how you used your Green Fence Farm produce, eggs, or meat (I am less interested in what you did with your Safeway purchases from Chile).

Welcome to the Green Fence Farm Blog

Yes, that's right -- I have bowed to technological peer group pressure and started a blog. This is mostly selfish. It turns out that our customers (and employees, and parents, and friends, and siblings) all have better ideas about how we should run the farm and what we (or others) should do with all this stuff (food, primarily) we churn out. I'm hoping to have a discussion chain (or whatever they are called) for every CSA delivery on what you did with the contents of your share (unless, of course, "composted it" is your answer -- that would just hurt my feelings, and it is MY blog) or to ask others what you should do with it. I also want to post recipes using our products and allow you all to comment on them-- just like epicurious.com, except without the huge readership, incredible budget for traveling the world to find new foods, and Ruth Reichl. So, if you have a recipe you've used and liked, email it to me, and I will post it as it's own "post." Send a picture too, if you have it (hint hint, Sarah -- I saw your beautiful barbecued quail on Facebook).

I'll also use this to keep you up to date on any exciting happenings on the farm -- like our fabulous new refrigerated room (formerly a rabbit house) -- but I will be sure to label these posts something like "dull farm news" so you don't have to dig through them to get to the chicken recipes.