Let us rejoice!  Summer is here!  How do we know?

Was it yesterday’s record high of 102° and the accompanying sweat in our eyes, grime behind our knees, and grumpy baby in our arms?

Is it the wild blackberries turning deep purple and plump along the edges of our fields?

Is it the hum of the fans, the buzz of the flies, the pleasant cracking and clinking of the ice in our sweet tea?

It is all these things — but mainly, we know it is summer because of this:

and especially

especially

especially

especially because of this:

Here at Frog Bottom last Friday:

Miles and Katie and Shannon and Ali hunched over the cucumber rows, plucking the mature ones from the undersides of the vines and filling their buckets for the weekend farmers market and CSA pick-up. It was a sticky sticky day, like all the days have been of late.

I ate my first cucumber salad of the season: two or three cucumbers halved lengthwise and sliced, minced scallions, minced parsley, olive oil, lime juice, feta cheese, salt and pepper.  Easy, fast, and unbelievably delicious.  We eat some iteration of this salad as often as possible during the summer!

And Arlo tried his first cucumber.  Tasty enough, he decided, but also really fun to squish between your toes.

* * *

Last July we wrote a post called “How to be cool as a cucumber” — definitely worth another look during these sweltering first days of summer.  Hie thee!  Learn a bit about the cucumber’s origins, learn about the different varieties we grow, and get some recipe ideas, including our go-to cucumber salad recipe, easy fridge pickles, and even a cucumber cocktail!

(Here’s Shannon showing off an Asian cucumber.  It’s a bit funny looking, to be sure, but it’s our favorite. Read all about it!)

It may not be obvious from our farm blog, since the focus is on vegetables, but it’s best I come clean now: I have a serious sweet tooth.  And when I grated too many vegetables for today’s lunchtime frittata, I knew exactly what to do with them.

I baked a cake.

Now, we’re not purists around here: our diet is so heavy with beets and chard and grassfed beef and eggs from our own chickens and milk from our goat that we don’t fret too much about some processed sugar and flour in our desserts.  But we like dessert so very much we’ve started experimenting with more whole grains.  And our recent bumper crop of summer squash and zucchini means it’s time to get creative.

There’s no way around it — y’all will be getting a lot of squash this summer.  So let’s just get right to it, shall we?

Chocolate Cake with Zucchini and Beets
adapted from this recipe at Chocolate & Zucchini

1 1/2 cups (180 g) all-purpose flour or whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup (60 g) whole wheat flour or spelt flour or other whole grain flour
1/2 cup (40 g) unsweetened cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup (160 g) brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp instant coffee granules or 2 tbsp strong coffee, cooled
3 eggs
2 cups zucchini, summer squash, and/or beets (any combination), grated
1 cup (170 g) chocolate chips or roughly chopped chocolate

Preheat the oven to 360°. Butter an 8″ or 9″ springform pan or 9″ cake pan.  Or try an 8″ cake pan, but proceed at your own peril — this is a fairly big cake!  If you have it, line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper and butter that as well.  Put a tablespoon or so of flour or cocoa into the pan and tap the pan from all sides to coat the butter with the flour or cocoa.

Put the flours, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl, and whisk to combine well.  Remove about half a cup to another bowl.

Using a food processor, stand mixer, electric hand mixer, or a spoon and some good old fashioned elbow grease, mix the olive oil and brown sugar well.  Add the vanilla and the coffee and mix.  Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating each one thoroughly before adding the next.

Add the wet ingredients to the large bowl of dry ingredients, and mix.  Add the grated vegetables to the reserved half cup of dry ingredients, and toss with your hands or a spoon to coat them lightly. Add them, along with the chocolate chips, to the batter.  Stir with a spoon until you can’t see any more dry flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth the surface with a spoon or spatula.  Bake for 40-50 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Cool for half an hour on a wire rack, and then unmold or turn out of the pan.  Let cool completely or just dig in.  Best enjoyed in a rocking chair while your partner and baby nap, with a cup of coffee and a view of the goldfinches partying at their feeder.  Also delicious shared.

(Additional notes below.)

Some notes:

This recipe is an old favorite of mine, but I played around with it just a bit to accommodate those extra beets and zucchini from lunch.  They didn’t quite add up to two cups, so I rustled around in the fridge and surfaced with half a sweet potato — how long had that been in there?  Anyway, I just grated that and added it to the beets and zucchini. Any combination of beets, zucchini, summer squash, and sweet potato will do.  They disappear almost completely into the cake and make it moist and sweet but not at all cloying.

Because a lot of the baking around here gets squeezed in during Arlo’s naps, I didn’t have time to wait for butter to soften.  I used olive oil instead to delightful results.  But feel free to use softened butter if you prefer.

This time, I just sprinkled powdered sugar on the cooled cake.  But it’s also great with toasted chopped hazelnuts, either stirred into the batter or mixed with a little brown sugar and sprinkled on top before baking.

And finally, if you have a kitchen scale, measuring the dry ingredients is a breeze!

Just a quick peek into how we’ve been keeping ourselves busy these last few months.  We’ll try to start every week in similar fashion here on the blog — a photographic look back at the week before. Hope you’ll join us!

* Thanks to Margaret Atwood for the reminder.

Sure, when they’re bunched they look like some wacky offspring of an octopus and … a Martian?  Tuck them (with some skillful maneuvering) into a mason jar and they make a striking centerpiece.  And I was half tempted to wear some as jewelry at our wedding a few years ago!  But behind their whimsical exterior lies a seriously delicious vegetable.  We’re talking about garlic scapes.

We’re pretty garlic crazy around here.  Rare is the evening that doesn’t begin with mincing a few cloves of garlic and tossing it into the cast iron skillet.  We hope the same will be true for you this summer too.  We grow a variety called Music, with beautiful purpley-white cloves and strong perfect flavor.

Sadly, we didn’t offer it last year.  We plant our garlic in the fall, and in the fall of 2008 we were still farming full-time on rented land in Northern Virginia, and we just weren’t able to get away long enough to plant garlic down here at Frog Bottom.  But we’re settled here now and we hope neither you nor we will ever have to go without garlic again!

While there are hundreds of garlic varieties, all of them are either softneck or hardneck.  Garlic from the grocery store is almost always softneck.  The cloves are small and grow in concentric circles.  Most softneck varieties have excellent shelf life, which makes life much easier for produce department managers.  But we think hardneck varieties just cannot be beat for flavor, and the kind we grow keeps quite well.

Hardneck garlic has one layer of large cloves which grow around a tough central stalk.  This stalk sends up a flower shoot in the spring: the scape!  We pluck these right off so the plant continues to put its energy into developing a large bulb.  And then we head right to the kitchen.

Garlic scapes have a pretty strong garlic flavor and can be used in any recipe that calls for garlic. Chop or mince them and throw them in a skillet with some olive oil or butter.  Cook until they begin to soften, and then add more vegetables and cook until the vegetables are tender — perhaps diced beets or roughly chopped chard from this week’s share??

Scapes are delicious in egg dishes like scrambled eggs and frittata.  Or try mixing sautéed scapes into ground beef or other ground meat for burgers or meatloaf.  They’re also great in stir-fry and soup!

We haven’t tried pickling scapes yet, but this recipe (scroll down once you click through) in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange summer newsletter has us itching to!

Perhaps our favorite thing to do with them?  Garlic scape pesto!  Garlic scapes and basil don’t grow at the same time, so you’ll have to either freeze the scapes and wait for basil season, or get creative.

Here’s how we did it last week:

In a food processor or strong blender, combine one bunch roughly chopped garlic scapes, a good squeeze of lemon juice, a couple pinches of salt, a good glug of olive oil, a small handful of pine nuts or any other nuts, and a good handful of something green and leafy — this would be an excellent use for your beet greens, which are delicious!  Chard works too.  Process until it gets to a consistency you like — the scapes can be a little tough so I prefer to process the pesto till it’s fairly smooth.  You might need to add more olive oil, or a little water, to thin it out.  Taste it and see if you want a bit more salt or lemon juice.  Pesto is a very forgiving sauce, so don’t be afraid to experiment!  Put it in a bowl and stir in a half cup to a cup of grated parmesan cheese.  Et voila!

(You can make this pesto without a food processor or blender.  Just mince those scapes as finely as you can!)

Pesto is so versatile and will keep for several days in your fridge or almost indefinitely in your freezer. In the last week and a half or so we have put it on pasta, stirred it into scrambled eggs while they were cooking, spread it on top of salmon before sliding it under the broiler, stirred it into sautéed vegetables, and used it as pizza sauce.  It would also be great stirred into soup, or any kind of egg, potato, or pasta salad.

Tell us about your garlic scape adventures!