Simple dahl

Ah, it will be lovely to add some love apples to this simple dahl, but until then, here is a basic dahl using some of our lovely July share.

Dice an onion and sautee it for 5 – 10 minutes in about a tablespoon of your favorite curry powder and a healthy dollop (2 tbsp?) of a nice olive oil or ghee. Add one or two diced zucchini and a few finely chopped leaves of kale or chard, and saute for a few more minutes.
Add this mixture to some lentils which you have already rinsed and soaked. Make sure to add enough fresh water for a long cooking time. Add some diced potatoes (I think last week’s were the best potatoes ever!), and some diced or sliced sweet carrots. Bring this mixture to a boil, then let it simmer for 30 minutes or more, making sure you don’t run out of water. Add salt and more curry to tase, serve over rice, and enjoy (perhaps with white wine with some fresh basil…or basil lemonade).

(I added this to the recipes section, but thought I’d add it here as well.)

Time Flies Like an Arrow. Farm Flies Like a Tomato.

We are rushing to get ready for vacation and we’re noticing those tomato plants have grown like weeds. I need to build a trellis for them, like, yesterday.

So if any folks have a hankering for some post-setting, wire straining, vine-tying etc. please come on out on Wednesday anytime from 8 am till dusk. It will be a marathon workday and I could really use as many hands as possible.

I imagine we’ll set posts in the morning, which involves whacking things with sledgehammers and some backwoods carpentry, then we’ll move on to stretching high tensile wire between posts. Once the wire is up, we can get into tying the tomato plants to the wire. It’s like the trellis you’ve seen in vineyards, but instead of waiting for your boring old wine to develop its nose, you’ll be eating delicious marinara sauce in a fraction of the time.

I will provide a hot grill upon which we may murder vegetables and hot dogs for sustenance during the day. If enough people show up, we can call it a party, a Trellis Party. Oh yeah.

Seriously, if folks have time, please come out. This is definitely a big one, and the potential for an awesome yield of savory globes is on the line. If we don’t tie these suckers up now, they will be sprawling and rank in a week, which means we will all get fewer love apples, which is never good.

See you in the garden hardy members!

–Matt

Garden of Abundance

The sun has been out for the past few days, and things are really taking off! The squash and cabbage are huge, corn is getting bigger each week, and the sunflowers are smiling happily over the fields.

While the peas are just about done for the year, the beans are just starting to take off. This morning Christie and I helped Catherine put in the bamboo poles for the pole beans to climb. While they are only a few inches high today I’m sure they will shoot up a few feet in the next couple weeks.

If you haven’t been out in a few weeks or had the chance to linger at the CSA pick-up, I encourage you to stop by and see the abudance of mid-summer.                                                                                         In a call for weekly harvest help, head out Wednesday morning to bask in the bounty of beans and help pick all of the wonderful veggies and herbs that will be going home with all the CSA members this week!

This week’s pictures coming soon…..

Red Planet’s Summer Vacation

Please mark your calendars: we will be taking off for Maine at the beginning of August. So there will be no pick up on August 5th.
We will need a few people to go out there and check on things while we’re gone. Maybe do a little watering or weeding. Definitely pick beans.

And thank you to everyone that came out this past week; the garden is looking great and harvesting was a pleasure with so much help!

See you tomorrow!

I want everyone to know I’ve got help for tomorrow’s harvest. Thank you!
And from now on the place to sign up for helping is the SIGN UP SHEET next to the SIGN OFF SHEET during weekly pickups. Some of you saw it last week. It has the days of the week & what we plan on doing, with blank spaces for you to sign up for morning or afternoon work. If you want a phone call reminder the night before your work day, put your number down next to your name. I think this will work better, and allow the blog more room for fun stuff, like Hannah and Kristen’s beautiful photos, and hopefully more recipes. We have some great cooks in our csa, besides more photographers, designers, and twins than any other csa, I’m sure.

What to do with favas?

Hannah, Christie and I all live together and share our CSA, and on Wednesdays we’ve gotten into the habit of cooking up our CSA haul and sitting down together for dinner. We were thrilled to pick up our pound of fava beans last week, because none of us have ever cooked with them before. We shelled the beans and decided to peel off their skins, and then sauteed them with herbs and zucchini from Red Planet. We got this beautiful white and green dinner, and loved every bite:

Fava and white beans

So now that we’re hooked on favas, we’re wondering: what next? Some of you out there must have delicious fava bean recipes, and we want to try them! If you’d like to post one, or share other recipes that have grown out of our CSA so far this season, you can log into the blog by going to wordpress.com. Our user-name is redplanetvegetables, and the password is csa2009. The “New Post” button is at the top of the page.

- Kaya

Pictures and Pizza

Zucchini Pizza!

Big Sky over the farm

Corn is coming along

Catherine picking peas

Dill gone to seed

Beans we mulched today

Barley

I headed over to the farm today with two good friends and did a bunch of weeding, mulching and pea picking! The farm looked great, what a difference a few days of sun make!

Here are some pictures of today’s work day, along with a picture of the beautiful zucchini pizza we made from two weeks ago.

Try making one yourself!

I recommend using Olga’s Cup and Saucer par-baked pizza shells (available at east side market, or olga’s cup and saucer (http://www.olgascupandsaucer.com/). Try making your own tomato sauce with either fresh or canned tomatoes, tossing in all the fresh herbs from your share. We used Narragansett Creamery’s mozerella cheese, and then topped with sliced zucchini. Delicious!

Here are some recipes from online!

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grilled-Zucchini-Pizza/Detail.aspx

http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/07/lemony-zucchini-goat-cheese-pizza/

Enjoy!

Hannah

A Wedding!

Congratulations to Mike and Sarah, two of our CSA members,
who recently tied the knot during a beautiful ceremony at Cathedral Ledge in New Hampshire.

Obsessed with the barn.

Barn in the morning

HARVEST HELP NEEDED TOMORROW!

Catherine could use your help tomorrow morning to harvest!

Please let her know if you can come or just show up around 10.

Your help = a bigger, cleaner, happier share of veggies

Thanks!

H