Down on the Farm

Buttercup Pasta

1 buttercup squash
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup chicken stock (or other stock or water)
1 pound fusilli or other pasta
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 teaspoon sugar (optional)
5-6 leaves sage
½ cup fresh grated parmesan plus more for on top

The hardest part of the recipe is preparing the squash. You need to peel it. The easiest way I think is to cut the squash in half, scrape out the seed, cut into sections, then slice off the peel with a knife. Then, using a food processor, finely grate all the squash. After this the recipe is easy.

Melt the butter in the bottom of heavy bottomed pot. Add the squash, ½ cup stock, and the garlic. Stir occasionally. As it dries out and threatens to stick, add another ¼ cup stock. Repeat as needed, but don’t thin it any more than necessary. Chop the sage and add it midway through the cooking. When the squash begins to fall apart and get soft (about 10-15 minutes), put the pasta in to cook. Taste the squash and add salt and pepper and sugar to taste. When the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the sauce with the cheese. Mix it all up. Serve topped with more parmesan and fresh ground pepper.

Cornelia and I made this Tuesday night, and it was awesome. It is pictured above with the collard green ribbons. This recipe is roughly based on one in the Minimalist Cooks at Home, by Mark Bittman.

CSA Week Sixteen

News from the field:

Not much to say. Fall is here. Only a few more weeks until the CSA and our farmer’s markets wrap up. We really wish we had more season to work with – even though the farm business is a ton of work, we love doing it. We are already starting to think about next year – what to plant, what farm projects we want to accomplish this winter, which projects we need to push off into the future some more. Each year gets better for us, and I guess each year we get better at this. So we will enjoy these last few weeks and look forward to next year.

In the Basket:

Tomatoes. The last remnants of summer, thanks to those greenhouses.

Green things: Mesclun, broccoli, and romaine.

Collards. Collards are a Southern cooking green that we love around here. You can cook them Southern style, but we love them in ribbons. Cut along the stem to remove it, stack up the leaves one on top of the other like sheets of paper, roll up like a cigar, cut across the short end as thinly as possible, and you end up with a bunch of thin ribbons. Wash the ribbons, heat up a cast iron skillet, put in oil, throw in the still damp collards and some chopped garlic, cook 3-4 minutes until bright green and soft, salt and enjoy.

Red onions for the salad, sandwich, or sauteing.

Winter squash and sage: One acorn and one buttercup. Recipe on the back, which we just finished eating, and it is yum yum good.

Brussel Sprouts: It appears we did not plant enough brussel sprouts this year, and the ones we did plant have only provided a medium yield. But here is a sample for the brussel sprout lover in your family. Be sure not to overcook, and try them seared in a hot skillet.

Old Shaw Farm Basket Amnesty Program: This is a gentle reminder to please return any baskets you have lying around – no questions asked! Not only is the season winding down, but our supply is dwindling for the last few weeks.

This time of year

Dana and Waverly rocked to help bring in the harvest yesterday. Here Dana and Wavy are washing broccoli, and Corny is washing lettuce. It was one of those days we started out in hats and fleeces and ended up in shorts and t-shirts.

Cornelia trimming onions. Onions and squash curing in the greenhouse and fall mesclun in the background.

A cover crop of winter rye and vetch on the field that Josh plowed.

Site news

I redid some of the links on the left. It turns out there are tons of interesting farm and food blogs out there. Enjoy!

And I also put up a description of the apprenticeship opportunities we will have for 2007. I know it may seem a little early to be thinking about '07, but some people are already out their looking for apprenticeships, and next year will be here before you know it. So if you know of someone who is fun, and who wants to farm with all their heart and soul, and who understands veggie farming is hard work, send them our way. We will show them the secret to getting rich by starting a small organic family farm. In case it wasn't obvious, that last sentence was a joke. It made me chuckle, at least.

Henry is ten months old!

Henry turned ten months old on Saturday. He is such a great kid -- happy, easygoing, fun loving and a talker! He loves to make all kinds of sounds. He makes great car sounds, and has lots of "words" including bye bye and names for all of us (Wa wa for Wavy). He is definitely good at making himself understood one way or another.

He LOVES peekaboo and that's what he and Cornelia were doing in the photo above .

CSA Week Fifteen

News from the field:

After the frost last week, Indian summer this week. It doesn’t get much better than this.

We continue in fall clean up mode. Pulling tomato stakes, cleaning the greenhouses, and making plans for next year (hint: we will probably expand our tomato and basil production significantly!)

We say goodbye to Kat this week. Tuesday was her last harvest. She has been an awesome part of the farm crew, a great housemate, and a good friend. Her boyfriend, Jence, has been staying with us too for the last couple of weeks, and we will miss him, especially his laughter. Kat and Jence will be timber framing, skiing and otherwise adventuring, and we are glad for them, but we will miss them. Don’t forget to visit Kat!!!

In the Basket:

Sweet corn and tomatoes. This is probably the last of the corn, and it is close to the last of the tomatoes. The tomato plants have really slowed down their production, and there won’t be many more after this.

Salad fixins: Spinach, baby beet greens, and salad turnips. People love beet greens in the spring, but they also make a nice fall treat as the weather cools down. You can use the beets greens as a cooked side green, or as a big leaf in a salad.

Onions!! French onion soup recipe is on the back. The fall dishes continue. Don’t be afraid to blow all your onions on the recipe – there will be more to come!

Carrots: crunchy and orange, and sweetened by the frosts last week.

Golden beets: The parade of orange veggies continues with these sweet golden beets. I find these less “beet-y” then the red ones. People who don’t like beets tend to like these better than red ones, but they’re all good in my mind!!

Leeks: A couple more tender leeks so that you have some alliums left after the french onion soup.

French onion soup

6-8 cups yellow onions
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon canola oil (you can use olive oil in place of the butter or canola oil or both but it may scorch if you are not super careful)
1/2 tsp of white sugar
1 cup white wine (optional)
2 quarts beef broth (or chicken broth, vegetable broth or even water)
Salt and freshly ground pepper
6-8 slices french bread
1 clove garlic
1 ½ cups grated Gruyere or Swiss cheese or a mixture of either with Parmesan
cheese
¼ cup Cognac or sherry (optional)

Use thick- bottomed pot or kettle. Heat the butter and canola oil on medium heat, then add onions and 1 teaspoon of salt. Mix onions with oil and salt, stirring until onions wilt. Turn heat to low, sprinkle on sugar, cover, and stir every 2-3 minutes until onions are deep golden brown, approximately 30-40 minutes. Add white wine and boil down until it is nearly evaporated. Add broth and simmer partially covered for 45 minutes.

While soup is simmering, toast bread slices (on a sheet in a 325 degree oven). Rub the toasted bread with a raw garlic clove. Season the soup, if needed, with salt and pepper. Add the cognac or sherry, if using, then ladle soup into oven-proof bowls. Place a slice of bread into each bowl and divide the cheese among the bowls. Place a sheet pan into a 350 degree oven and place soup bowls into pan. Bake until bubbling and cheese is slightly browned, 20-30 minutes.

The beginning of the end

Well, Kat moved out yesterday. She has been an important part of the crew and a good friend these past two seasons. And this season she was kind of living with us. She and Jence (her beau) are off to build houses in Maine for a while, and then off to ski out west for the winter, and then who knows what. Thanks Kat!

Kat, holding Wavy, as Cornelia cooks some dinner one night after work.

And it continues to cool, the leaves are really starting to turn color now, we are getting calls for donations to foilage festivals, and boy, are the days getting shorter. I went up to cover some crops for an expected frost last night, and it was starting to get dark at 7-7:30pm. A couple of short months ago it was still light at 9:00-9:30pm.

We still have some season left, but the tide has definitely turned.

More links we like

I have been checking out the wealth of small farms with blogs out there. It is awesome. Go small farms!

High Hopes Gardens

Farm Girl Fare

Apifera Farm

Clodhopper Farm

There are too many more to catalog here. But these few recent posts I have done on other sites we like has got me thinking that it is time to redo some of the links on the left. But not this morning. The kids are waking up, the greenhouses need watering, we are still cleaning up from waverly's birthday party yesterday, etc. etc.

Market day

We do the Mad River Green Farmer's Market every Saturday.

Yesterday was market day, and this week one of our tables had a lot of orange and white.

Carrots, leeks, golden beets (after all the red beets had sold), and salad turnips.

There are five veggie growers at that market and we all get along remarkably well. I say it is remarkable because on some level every veggie grower at a market is competing with each other, but on another level there is a shared sense of community. We try not to view other veggie vendors as competitors. Instead, we figure that as long as big supermakets in Vermont carry produce from California, it is up to all the small local growers to work together to increase the size of the farmer's market pie. The demand at a particular farmer's market is not static, and if we can all work together to get more people buying local, we can increase all of our sales.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying there is another grower at our Saturday market that we really like -- Tunbridge Hill Farm. They are, in some ways, what we aspire to be -- family run, quality produce, local sales, and a healthy does of fun. And Jean and Wendy are really nice to deal with, and always willing to talk shop.

In fact yesterday, Zea from Tunbridge Hill (who is 7) invited Wavy to come over and help her sell mini pumpkins.

Wavy brought over her babies (in the carriage at left), and they had a blast. It is nice that Zea is so nice to Wavy. See you next week Zea!

Happy birthday Waverly!!

Waverly is three today. We love her!!

Beets

CSA Week Fourteen

News from the field:

Brrrrr. We had two nights of frost this week. I smelled a neighbor’s woodstove the other day. The tide has turned and fall is upon us.

It is getting to be clean up time in the field. We have planted some cover crops that will hold the open soil during the winter, and then add nutrients and organic matter in the spring. We have tomato stakes to pull, onions to dry, and new ground to plow for next year. We may take on some new building projects this fall, and the repairs I have needed to make to the Cub tractor might actually get done now that our time is opening up a little.

We will now start losing some crops in earnest, like cucumbers, summer squash, melons, and heirloom tomatoes. But we gain some things as well. For example, this week we have potatoes and leeks and a yummy recipe for you. Winter squash, carrots, cold hardy greens like spinach, collards, and kale, all should be coming.

In the Basket:

Summer’s goodness: Sweet corn and tomatoes. String beans make one last appearance.

Salad fixins: Mesclun and radishes.

Potatoes and leeks: Recipe is on the back. The first of several fall dishes for your table.

Carrots: Take the Old Shaw Farm taste test! This is our first year trying out some colored carrots. We have orange, yellow, and somewhat purple carrots for your salad or plate. We did a blind taste test on raw carrots, and purple won. Which makes some sense because people ate purple carrots for millennia and yellow carrots for centuries before orange carrots were developed. Anyway, see what you think. Note: the purples seem to lose some purpleness when cooked.

Garlic: by request!!

Wendy Stein's Potato Leek Soup

6 medium leeks, thinly sliced
4 medium potatoes, cut into cubes
2 14½ oz cans chicken or vegetable broth
¼ cup butter or margarine
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 cup half and half
fresh chives (if desired)

Mix all the ingredients, except half and half and chives, into a slow cooke, like a crock pot.
Cover and cook on low heat 8-10 hours, or, if you want, high heat for 4-5 hours.
Pour vegetable mixture in batches into food processor or blender and blend until smooth.
Put it back into the slow cooker and add half and half.
Cook for another 20-30 minutes on low.
Serve sprinkled with chives, if you want.

Much thanks to CSAer Wendy Stein for this recipe!!

localvore challenge

It is quite the honor to be posting my first blog! Josh and I are also doing the localvore culninary challenge, and whew, what a trip! From trying to locate the food, to fighting off the urge to eat just that last half pint of ice cream in the freezer...we are taking more time to make our meals than ususal. Despite the time it takes to bake the bread and make each part of the meal, as well as lack of olive oil in the meal preps, we feel good about the choices. Some localvores choose a "wild card"--something that one cannot do without....mine is coffee. We have also chosen to "spice globally", meaning that we can use the spices not usually found in our garden, such as salt and pepper. Bravo to the folks who opt out of this tweak to the rules!

Old Shaw Farm is supplyig the veggies this week--so far we have made a potato and kale and onion mash, salad with feta, tomatoes and salad turnips, and boiled sweet corn for a delicious treat. Corn bread and whole wheat loaves are our carb delicacies, with some good ol' German Spatzle to be made tomorrow evening. This is super-labor-intensive, so i will only make it once. Grilled chicken and baked apples rounded out the meal last evening.

The Upper Valey Food Co-op was a pleasant place to shop, in that they not only carried the flour and corn meal we needed (from Butterworks farm--see Kat's entry), they labelled their items in the store as "local" to make the treasure hunt that much easier this wekend! Josh and I began at lunch on Sunday, realizing that we did not have local butter for breakfast. We decided to make latkes with oil-- the last for the week! Tonight we will join with the rest of the OSF crowd for a localvore feast of roasted chicken, stir fried veggies, corn bread, apple pie, squash mash and fresh corn. YUMMMM.

100 Mile Dinner

Last night's localvore dinner consisted of spicy corn cakes with an Old Shaw Farm vegetable medley. It takes longer to cook with all local ingredients (mostly because there are no pre-made ingredients), but the result has been super yummy. Other highlights so far of localvore meals include polenta, veggie chili, and apple crisp. I stopped by the local food fest at Shelburne Orchards on Sunday and picked a good supply of apples for the week-- and saw lots of other people very excited about eating local foods. This idea of focusing on local products seems to be gaining more and more momentum. And being lucky enough to live on an organic farm, it's surprisingly not that difficult to come up with three meals a day that are solidly local.

Pulling in the oars

We are expecting our first frost tonight. This is early for us, but not unheard of. In an average year, we get our first frost around the end of September. But today was autumnal, no doubt about it -- sunny, dry, high of 63.

But frost tonight means that we have to harvest certain veggies now, and then cover certain crops to try to nurse them along for a few more weeks. We ran out this morning and pulled all our onions, and all the winter squash that was ready.

And we finally remembered to bring the camera up into the field when we went up to pick onions this morning.

Wavy doing a little empty onion truck dance when we first got up to the field.

Maryellen and Henry picking while Wavy and I gathered and stacked.

Hmmmm . . I think the CSAers may get a French onion soup recipe this week.

Wavy sitting on top of the FIRST full truck of onions. There was at least one more onion load, plus winter squash loads. Then we had to cover what we could cover with remay for the frost.

But even after that we still had time to go for one last swim at Harvey's Lake (it was cold), and then out to eat at the local greasy spoon. So it was not a bad way to bid adieu to summer.

Localvore Week at Old Shaw Farm

Inspired by the localvore happenings around Vermont, a few of us here at the farm are going to eat only foods produced within a hundred miles for the next week. It should be a fun challenge!

I did a grocery shop in preparation last night and it was the most meat and dairy intensive shopping I've ever done. Today we baked bread with wheat from Butterworks Farm in Westfield, Vermont. I also found cornmeal, beans, and, of course, yogurt from Butterworks Farm. As everyone who has tried out the localvore project in Vermont has found, Butterworks farm is THE place for local products not easily found. (They even make sunflower oil, but we haven't been able to find any yet.)

During harvest today I kept thinking about what I could make out of the crops we were picking. Kale casserole, carrot stew, potato pancakes... (When I figure out how to put pictures on the blog, I'll post photos of the creations.)

Crop shots

Onions drying on racks.

Carrots starting to size up for fall.

CSA Week Thirteen

News from the field:

Fall is coming. This basket reflects that transition. We still have a lot of the sweet yellow goodness of summer – sweet corn, sun golds, crookneck squash. But the cool weather friends – salad turnips, cooking greens, are back. Fall is good for eating (and cooking), but I am not ready to let go of summer quite yet.

In the Basket:

Summer’s goodness: Sweet corn and sun golds

Salad fixins: Mesclun, romaine lettuce, radishes. Pasta with mesclun recipe on the back.

Mustard greens - These are a spunky, nutritious cooking green. Try them sautéed with walnuts and lemon juice. Make a pasta salad with chopped tomatoes, pine nuts, goat cheese, pasta and mustard greens tossed with a little olive oil. Or cook them southern style and serve with beans and rice.

Salad turnips - These are the Asian variety of turnips that we grow for raw eating. You may remember them from the spring. (They don’t like hot weather). They’re flavorful, crunchy and wet. Try them sliced thin in salad or chunked and dipped in Annie’s Goddess dressing. You do not need to peel them. The greens are edible, nutritious and delicious. I like to saute the greens and then season them with tamari, lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

Crookneck squash - I like the flavor of these best of all the squashes we grow. Perfectly squashy, sweet, almost corn-y.

Red onion and white onion - Both of these are sweet and mild enough to eat raw in salad or on a sandwich. The white onion is probably the sweeter of the two, and the red more richly oniony.

Beets - You can grated raw beets into salads or use them to garnish soups. Beets also roast well – though if you roast them in the same pan as other veggies they will turn the other veggies red. I like beets best boiled, with the peel on, till fork tender. I then plunge them into cold water, slip the peel off, slice and eat warm (or reheated in a pan) with butter.

Pasta with mesclun

8 oz spaghetti or other pasta
3/4 bag (6 ounces) mesclun, washed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
1-2 tablespoons tamari or other soy sauce
fresh ground black pepper
parmesan cheese

Heat the garlic and olive oil gently, just until warm.

Cook the pasta, drain. While its still warm, mix with the mesclun, warm oil and garlic, and tamari. Toss to mix until greens wilt slightly. Season with black pepper. Serve immediately, topped with grated parmesan cheese.

A lot of the meals in our house consist of various combinations of pasta and veggies. This is one of my favorites. It is adapted from Lorna Sass’s book Short-Cut Vegetarian. You can add pan fried tempeh or chicken to make it a complete meal.

More links

It is a rainy Sunday afternoon. I am always tired on Sundays after the Friday harvest/Saturday market mania. So I was taking it a little easy by just getting some paperwork together for our annual organic certification inspection this week, and I started surfing the web a bit. It turns out there are jillions of interesting food/farm/veggie sites out there.

Chocolate and Zucchini is a site authored by a French woman, but the site is mercifully in English. Her August 25th entry features the Zephyr summer squash we grow and love.

Here is a link to a page with Vermont farm websites, all in one place. Most the farm sites aren't blogs -- they are just commerical/promo type sites -- but still, it is fun to see all the different small farms.

Apparently, the Nation recently (like last week) did a big issue on food stuff. Most of the material from that issue is available on line. Hopefully, it will still be available on line in the off season, so I can actually read most of it!

I am sure there is more fun stuff out there. Enjoy your websurfing break.