In Your Share (Dec 15th edition)

DSCF0244

We planted baby spinach in our high tunnels late this fall and it’s finally big enough for us to harvest a few leaves. Hope you enjoy this little bit of tasty tender winter salad! Recipes for spinach and all the other veggies in the share are available at your exclusive CSA recipe site Cook With What You Have. Check your email for the password to access the site and enjoy your 24/7 access to recipe inspiration!

This week your share may include…

  • Beets: Big fat beautiful red winter beets! Some of my favorite go-to beet recipes are here.
  • Brussel Sprouts: After a couple of hard frosts these are going to be great! Try them roasted or in my old standby recipe, Brussel Sprouts with Pesto & Gnocchi.
  • Cabbage: Winter cabbage is so tasty! Like many of the brassicasea family, it gets sweeter with all the cold weather.
  • Celeriac: While technically related to celery and sometimes called celery root, this vegetable is really a thing unto itself. It adds a mild celery flavor and can be roasted with other roots, added to soup or grated into salad. Here is my favorite recipe for traditional french Celery Remoulade and there are lots more ideas in the recipe packet.
  • Garlic: Beautiful Music is one of our longest storing and most productive garlic’s. The large cloves have a nice medium to hot garlicky flavor.
  • Kale: Black Tuscan (aka Toscano, Lacinato or Black Dinasour) is very dark green with skinny highly savoyed leaves. It makes a great raw salad and this is one of my favorites – Raw Tuscan Kale Salad with Pecorino. You could also try this traditional Italian bread soup from one of our partner restaurants, Nostrana.
  • Onions: Both cippolini and yellow Patterson onions in the share this week.
  • Parsnips: The first parsnip harvest of the season! These are cousins to the carrot and we grow them using similar techniques. However, culinarily they are very different. Parsnips are rarely eaten raw, but when cooked they add a nice sweet nutty depth of flavor to many dishes. Try them sautéed and added to soups or roasted with other root veggies.
  • Rutabaga/Turnip: Gilfeather is an anomalous vegetable whose origins are shrouded in secrecy.  Deborah Madison assures us it is a rutabaga, but it is celebrated every October in Wardsboro, Vermont’s Gilfeather Turnip Festival.  Whatever you call it, this hardy root has a sweet creamy white interior that makes a nice mash or latkes with potatoes.  Read more about it in the Slow Food Arc of Taste and check out the Cook With What You Have website lots of recipes.
  • Spinach: This little bag makes for a nice bit of tender tasty winter salad!
  • Winter Squash – Pie Pumpkin, Acorn & Delicata:  I’m making pumpkin pie for the holidays! These little acorn squash make a perfect single serving when cut in half and baked. Delicata squash are one of my favorites too – bake them or make these beautiful little squash rings.

Coming soon… the New Year: the next CSA pickup will be the week of Jan 5th 2015!