Afternoon, y’all!  79° and breezy and a long lunchtime nap — we’ll take it!  We hope the eatin’ has been good where you’re at.  Here at the farm, we’ve been eating lots of salad, lots of homemade pizza, and lots of tomato sandwiches.  Those three things could keep us fed and happy for a very long time!  But sometimes we manage something new.

Down below the photos, we’ve listed a few recipes we’ve been loving lately.  Some CSA members have also been sharing recipes via email, the comments sections here on the blog, and over at our Facebook page.  We’ll try to highlight some of those soon as well.  And plans are still afoot for adding forums to this website, so you can share your recipes and cooking adventures directly; we’ll keep you posted!

Here are some tasty ideas for working through these early summer CSA shares and farmers market finds.  Most of them would be fantastic fare for your Fourth of July BBQ!  Lots of these posts link to other great recipes too.

Ginger Scallion Sauce at Chocolate & Zucchini

Red, White & Blue Roast Potatoes and Firecracker Potato Salad (two recipes) at Babble

Fondant Fennel from Edward Schneider at Mark Bittman

Raw Beet Salad at Just Braise

Quick Sauté of Zucchini with Toasted Almonds at Smitten Kitchen

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade at Orangette

101 Fast Recipes for Grilling at The Minimalist

Soon, it should be easier to search recipes we’ve posted or linked to here on the farm blog.  In the meantime, you might enjoy just browsing the posts with recipes.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!  What will you be eating?

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!

The planting of the fall and winter veggies continues!  Amazing to think that these little bursts of purple and green will turn into gorgeous earthy crimson globes.  Delicious ones.  I invite everyone who loves beets to tell us why — leave a comment here!  And I will consider it my mission for the fall to convince the rest of you that you love beets too.