It’s funny the way the same vegetables on the same farm in the same soil can give such varying yields from year to year.  Most of us are familiar with squash and zucchini overload – but this year, our first generation of squash was decimated by squash bugs.  (The current generation looks great though — first pick this morning!)  If you were in our CSA last year you’ll remember weeks when you had to conscript perfect strangers to help you haul your watermelons to the car!  The melons are tasty this year, but we’re not seeing the bumper crops of last season.

But the tomatoes!  Last year’s record heat was hard on them, but this year they’re hopping.

So is the eggplant.  Which you might have noticed.

Bounty!

We love the stuff, but we know it can be intimidating.  Perhaps it’s because it’s one of only a few vegetables you really can’t eat raw; uncooked eggplant contains a compound called solanine, which can cause stomach upset at high doses.  Or is it that eggplant has a reputation for being bitter?  Eggplant can become bitter as it ages, so it’s true that you risk bitterness when you buy it at the grocery store – there’s no telling how long ago it was harvested.  But we pick ours within a couple days of delivering it to you and keep it in cool storage, so it’s not bitter.  Maybe eggplant is intimidating because despite the incredible culinary diversity in our country, most Americans don’t eat a lot of eggplant as kids.

But we’re here to tell you: eggplant is versatile and delicious.

Eggplant blossom

Storing eggplant: There’s no great answer here.  Eggplant does not store well.  It prefers a temperature of about 50°F. You can leave it on the counter for a day or so, or put it on the bottom shelf of the fridge, but in either place it will begin to age pretty quickly, getting brown spots and losing its mild flavor.  So plan to use it quickly.  Or pickle it!

Using eggplant: Was there ever a more versatile vegetable? Eggplant is such a fantastic element of vegetable-heavy summer fare because 1) it’s hearty and lends real bulk to a meal, and 2) it’s like a sponge, absorbing the flavors of whatever you’re cooking.  It’s great broiled, grilled, sautéed, and roasted.

To salt or not to salt? You’ve probably heard that you need to salt eggplant before cooking.  We disagree.  More or less.  Here’s the deal: since grocery store eggplant is sometimes not fresh, salting can help draw out the bitterness.  But our eggplant is young and tender, so this truly isn’t an issue.  The more compelling reason to salt eggplant has to do with its amazing ability to absorb.  If you’re going to be sautéing your eggplant on the stovetop, you might consider salting it; it will soak up far less of your cooking oil.  But if you’re roasting it (solo or with other summer vegetables like tomatoes and onions and squash, with which it pairs deliciously) or grilling it or broiling it, we say: don’t bother.

To salt: Cut the eggplant into cubes or slices.  Toss lightly with salt.  Put the eggplant into a colander and let it stand for about an hour.  Give it a quick rinse and blot or squeeze dry.  If your recipe calls for salt, wait till the dish is cooked and taste before adding additional salt.

Lots (and LOTS) of recipes below!

Heather in the eggplant patch

Whole Roasted Eggplant. Preheat your oven to 400°F.  Prick the eggplant in several spots with a fork.  Bake on a cookie sheet or in a casserole dish until soft to the point of collapsing, 30 minutes to 1 hour.  Eat this as a vegetable, drizzled with a little olive oil and some fresh herbs and salt.  Or scoop out the flesh and purée it (or mix it by hand) with some olive oil, garlic, chopped parsley or other herbs, and salt and pepper; serve with crackers, bread, as a dip for other vegetables, or as a sandwich spread.  Add some tahini and lemon juice and you’ve got baba ghanoush. (Bonus: I think roasting eggplants smell like brownies in the oven.)

Our Favorite Ratatouille. This stuff is fantastic. Serve it as a side with dinner, but make enough to have leftovers.  It’s also great in wraps and as a pizza topping!

Chinese Noodle Salad with Roasted Eggplant. Scrumptious. Lots of chopping, but so worth it.

Khoresh Bademjan (Persian Eggplant Stew). Thanks to CSA member Bethany for this one!

Bhurtha. A wonderful Indian dish of eggplant and tomatoes with lots of great spices. Thanks to CSA member Stacey for this one!

Eggplant Fries. We haven’t tried these yet but they look so interesting.

Roasted Eggplant Dip. Mmm! From Noell, who used to host our Ginter Park CSA pickup.

Melanzane Sott’Olio (Pickled Eggplant under Oil). Mmm again!  How about a jar of this stuff, a couple sliced Brandywine tomatoes, some crusty whole grain bread, and a glass of wine? Dinner.

And if you still have eggplant left, check out: these eggplant recipes at Tasty Kitchen, The Crisper Whisperer – How to Handle Eggplant Overload at Serious Eats, and A Good Appetite – Counting the Ways to Cook an Eggplant at The New York Times.

Happy eating!

We’re still mad for summer vegetables, but these tiny beet seedlings in the greenhouse also have us daydreaming about early fall.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

It’s a Can-a-Rama! The folks at Canning Across America hope you’ll keep the momentum from National Can-It-Forward Day going all week long with home canning parties.

Simple Bites has a slew of great posts on food preserving. Canning 101: The Basics is a great place to start.

We’ve been on a lacto-fermentation kick here in the Frog Bottom kitchen – lately, with vegetables.  Famous lacto-fermented foods include yogurt, sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi.  Lacto-fermented vegetables use a simple brine of water and salt (and sometimes whey) – no vinegar – to encourage good bacteria to preserve the food.  We may write more about this at some point, so for now I’ll just say I love how fast and easy this is! A few minutes chopping, a few minutes stuffing a jar, and then just a few days of waiting for all that good bacteria to do its work.  No giant pots of boiling water, no hours at the stove – the salsa you see below took me about 20 minutes to prepare, and that was mainly because of all the chopping.  Cucumber pickles and okra pickles each took under 10 minutes.  Read a bit more, and find the salsa recipe we used, at Lacto-Fermentation: an Easier, Healthier, and More Sustainable Way to Preserve.

Check out this fun infographic on home gardening!

Tired of pesto and Caprese salads? Wait — not possible.  But, we think you should try these basil cookies anyway.

Here are five awesome tomato soup recipes.  Make ‘em now or freeze some of the incredible tomato bounty and try them when the first fall chill creeps in.

(Did you know freezing tomatoes can be as simple as waiting until they’re dead ripe and then throwing them whole into a Ziploc bag and stashing them in the freezer? A quick blanching/peeling/seeding will make them a bit easier to work with come thawing time, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, seriously, just throw them into the freezer whole.)

From the pen and kitchen of the ever-reliable Mark Bittman: 101 Simple Salads for the Season.  More fantastic and fast summer fare!

Umm, how fun does Lucky Peach look? It’s a new food journal published by the McSweeney’s folks. Have a look here.

And finally, we loved this essay about processing peaches and the way the long slog through a bushel of seconds can be a kind of meditation.

More to come later in the week! We’ve heard from a number of you that you need some help with okra, and with the mad bounty of eggplant, so that’s where we’ll start.

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Weekend Links is a regular feature here on the farm blog: a weekly(ish) list of articles, recipes, and other resources that have been inspiring and amusing us of late. A tasty smorgasbord for brain and belly!

Heather picks okra while some of the new chickens have a look.

Our fields and fridge are full of vegetables – and eggs! – and we’re feeling mighty inspired these days!  Just a taste of what we’ve been reading and cooking:

Did you know this coming Saturday, August 13, is the first annual National Can-It-Forward Day? The folks at Canning Across America, along with Jarden Home Brands (they’re the ones who make Ball jars and other canning products), are encouraging everyone to gather with family and friends at home canning parties to learn the basics of canning.  One of the coolest resources they’re offering is a day-long live stream of several how-to canning demos (mixed berry jam, kosher dills, tomatoes in their own juice, more!) happening at Seattle’s Pike Place Market.  See the live stream schedule and find the link here.

The August 2011 Bon Appétit had a fun article about an LA canning party. The recipes for dilly beans, pickled beets with star anise, tomato jam, and zucchini dill pickles are all on our list to try this summer!

And this recipe for onion jam has been tempting us for weeks.  Just onions, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, and butter!  I could do that today!  We think it would be especially delicious on pizza, topped with just about anything else that’s in season right now.

(We should point out the turn-the-jar-upside-down method of sealing is no longer recommended; we’ll probably just make one jar for the fridge and another for the freezer, but here are two good resources for safe canning guidelines.)

We’ve made this heavenly tomato & cheddar pie twice in as many weeks. It does require a little planning: the biscuit dough for the crust needs to chill for an hour, and the tomatoes need to drain for 30 minutes.  But otherwise it comes together quite easily.  And the crust is quite forgiving.  The second time we made it we didn’t use quite enough flour, and the dough seemed a sticky and hopeless mess as we eased it into the pie pan.  But it baked up beautifully, and didn’t get soggy even after a day in the fridge.   And seriously: tomatoes, mayonnaise, cheese, biscuit crust? Do we need to say more?  Make it! Any of the tomatoes you’ve been getting in your shares or at market will work great.

We haven’t tried it yet, but CSA members Yajaira and Domenick independently told us we also had to make this heirloom tomato pie.

And while we’re on the subject of tomatoes: how delicious does Tyler Florence’s Roasted Tomato Soup look?  Thanks to CSA member Tracy for this one.

We’re longtime fans of Mark Bittman.  We pull his How to Cook Everything down from the kitchen bookshelf at least weekly, often more.  The How to Cook Everything app is pretty great too!  For close to fifteen years he wrote a cooking column for the New York Times called The Minimalist.  We’ll admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment this winter when he decided to write less about cooking and more about food politics.  Certainly the systems of food production and distribution in this country are damaged, and we appreciate compelling writing from folks who can help us think about how we might begin to fix things.  But there are many people writing eloquently about these issues; fewer writers have Bittman’s skill for making home cooking seem simple, fun, and approachable.  So we were really delighted by one recent op-ed: “Make Food Choices Simple: Cook.”  In it, he argues we should cook more and eat out less – because it’s cheaper, because we have more control where the food comes from, and because it tastes better.  He writes:

When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.

Also fantastic?  ”101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less,” a Minimalist column from 2007.  Loaded with awesome ideas for no-fuss summer cooking.

Oh! We’ve posted our favorite ratatouille recipe before, but it bears reminding — early August is definitely ratatouille time in Central Virginia!

That does it for this week!  We’ll be back this weekend with more tasty links.  And we hope to post later this week about two delicious vegetables that we know can be intimidating: okra and eggplant.

We’ll wrap things up with some more recent images from the farm. (Click on any to see ‘em big!)

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Weekend Links is a (soon-to-be!) regular feature here on the farm blog: a weekly(ish) list of articles, recipes, and other resources that have been inspiring and amusing us of late. A tasty smorgasbord for brain and belly!