What did you do with Your July 7th CSA?

Ah yes, I am tres late in posting this question, but maybeI'll get some answers -- and you all better do something with your share soon because another one is just around the corner!

As a reminder -- and an incentive for any readers who mioght want to share recipes but aren't in the cSA -- here's what you got last week and what I said about it then:

· A bag of lettuce – not the really sweet stuff of spring. It is actually a bit late for it to be hanging in there, but we have had a lot of rain and cool nights, so it is here for this last appearance until fall. Unlike earlier greens, which needed the lightest of dressings – you can feel free to slather it on for these tougher leaves. Or just use them as a garnish like bed for your beet salad.
· A bag of spinach – almost the same story as above, though the spinach holds it together a little better (especially the variety I grow, after much experimentation – Bloomsdale Longstanding, really resistant to bolt).
· Swiss chard bundle with a chive blossom (or scape). I love Swiss chard – there is a recipe in the quail egg section of the blog that is my standard Swiss chard fare. You can use quail or chicken or no egg in it. Chard is in the beet family, and the different colors do taste differently – the closer to red the chard is, the more you will know it is a member of the beet family. The stem and the leaves are edible, but you will want to separate them to cook them because the stem takes longer to cook. Do check out the blog recipe for chard with eggs as well as using chard in the stuffed chicken. The shallot scape is an edible flower that you can use as you would an onion. Taste a little before you chop it up and put it in something; it packs a wallop. I added it because it can be used instead of onion in the stuffed chicken recipe.
· An herb bunch – mostly basil, but a small amount of oregano and tarragon included. I added this this week because of that darn chicken recipe. You could use this bunch, chopped, as the herbs called for (I did). If you aren’t succumbing to the immense pressure to make that chicken, you could just leave the bunch sitting around to make things smell like summer (and don’t worry about wasting basil – you are getting a lot more).
· A bunch of beets – they are beautiful this week – you get a selection of yellow, Detroit (dark red) and Chioggia (red and white).
· John’s broccoli. I haven’t seen it yet, but he assures me it is professional. John can grow cabbage and broccoli. When I plant either of these, I get cabbage and broccoli bugs the size of a Toyota. So let’s all just take a minute to thank our lucky stars for John (who is baking your bread as I write this).
· Beans – Fin de Bangol to be exact. John may be able to grow a cabbage, but I am the Queen of Beans. These are the thin French variety. Do not put these in a casserole with mushroom soup. Do not boil them all day with bacon (we may have some beans for that later in the season). Steam or boil them lightly – 2-3 minutes. Then throw them back in a pan with a little butter, maybe some lemon (though I like just butter). Or rinse them in cold water and use them in a salad compose -- dress them lightly in a vinaigrette and top with crumbled bacon (you know I would work it in) and hard boiled egg. Put your beet salad (see the blog for the recipe) next to it.
· 1/2 pint of black raspberries: these are incredible. Just eat them. Do not cook them, do not share them. These are why you are in a CSA – you cannot find them anywhere else.

CSA Chicken Supper

Take a Green Fence Farm Chicken, a couple of our eggs, and, if you are lucky enough to be one of our CSA members, your Swiss chard, beets, herbs, and shallot scape – and you too can have the delicious dinner pictured above (OK, I am no Phil Karsting in my food photography abilities – and you’ll have to make the Olive bread on your own).

The nice thing about this dinner, which consists of chicken stuffed under the skin, garlic greens done in the Jaleo way (see the recipe in an earlier post that Lynn submitted), and beets in sour cream and mustard sauce (which consists of sour cream and some Dijon like mustard – not exactly a Culinary Institute of America level endeavor) is that it can all be done ahead of time – the chicken can be prepared all the way through stuffing, then refrigerated until you are ready to cook; the beets can be cooked and dressed, then refrigerated, anytime; and the spinach can be cooked then just left on the stove until you warm it before dinner. Perfect dinner party fare: Pop the chickens in when your guests arrive (or are supposed to) then 90 minutes later, you have dinner all ready to go, 90 minutes you can sit be out of the kitchen with your guests making sure you get your share of the decent wine they brought or, depending on the quality of your friends, making sure they don’t steal stuff.

To make the chicken you need:
· One 3-4 lb GREEN FENCE FARM chicken (I do not guarantee the results unless you use our chickens. With other, inferior chicken, it could well taste like dried up old chicken McNuggets)
· One finely chopped red onion
· Olive oil to coat your sauté pan
· Two or three largish Swiss Chard leaves, green part removed from stem and used in something else (I just added it to the spinach in the Jaleo Spinach recipe to turn it into a Jaleo Greens recipe), dice the stems.
· 4 cloves of garlic – or garlic and minced shallot scape (flower, for those of you in our CSA lucky enough to be getting one of these this week).
· Whatever fresh herbs you have on hand – though I am partial to oregano and basil (and again, Green Fence Farm CSA members will be receiving a little of each). If you don’t have fresh herbs, just use some dried oregano.
· 1 GREEN FENCE FARM egg and one GREEN FENCE FARM egg yolk.
· 12 oz. cream cheese or cream cheese like goat cheese.
· ½ cup dry cheese, grate (like Parmesan or Asiago)

The steps to making the chicken:

At least two hours before cooking (but actually, you could do this part even 24 hours in advance):

1. Sauté onions in heated olive oil until translucent (about 5 minutes). Add chopped chard stem, garlic, and shallot scape. Continue sautéing over medium high heat, stirring often, until the the stem is soft but not too damp, another five minutes. Turn down the heat, add the fresh herbs and season, sautéing just until the herbs are wilted.
2. In your cuisnart, mix the cream cheese, egg and egg yolk, and dried cheese. Add the sauté mix and pulse 4-5 times – enough to mix and further dice the sauted veggies but not enough to make a bizarrely colored paste. You want to continue to see the dots of color the chard stem adds. Refrigerate for a minimum of one hour.
3. Anytime after the hour is up, prep the chicken. Cut out its backbone and reserve with the neck for stock (and yes, I do have 3000 back and neck bone baggies in my freezer). Turn the chicken on what used to be its back (breast up) and press down with your hand on the breastbone between the wings to break the bone. Loosen the skin by slipping your hand between the skin and breast – be careful not to tear it.
4. Put the refrigerated cream cheese mix in a pastry tube with the biggest tip you can find (or else it will get jammed up with Swiss chard bits and, when you impatiently keep trying to squeeze the tube anyway, even though you know it is jammed, it will blow up in a royal cream cheese, chard disaster. Don’t ask me how I know).Place the point under the skin and pipe the mixture in. You can work it around to go evenly over the breast and into the thighs, even a bit of the leg. Place in a baking or roasting pan skin side up (and though I didn’t make it this way when I was testing this, you could brush butter on the breast to give you an even more golden finished product – I’ll probably do that next time). At this point you can cover the chicken and refrigerate until you are ready to pop it in the oven, Doris Day like, and sashay into your guests who will marvel at how calm you are.
2 hours before dinner:
1. Preheat the oven to 375. Put the chicken in, uncovered, from 75-95 minutes depending on the size. Let sit at least five minutes and cut into quarters for four servings.

To make the beets, boil until fork tender (15-30 minutes depending on size) or roast, and peel. Chop into bite sized pieces if they didn’t already come that way. Mix sour cream or crème fraiche with a teaspoon or two of grainy French mustard and mix that with the beets.

To make the Jaleo greens, follow the Jaleo recipe posted last month, but add your chard and beet greens to the spinach (you may have to remove the beet greens from the stems if the stems are large enough to look chewy).

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!