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!

Just photos today. Back soon with some recipes and links!

Things have been busy over at the farm Facebook page though!  We encourage you to check in there regularly to share your recipe ideas, get ideas from other CSA members and market customers, and enjoy some more snapshots of our farm season.  You don’t even have to have a Facebook account!

We hope to be back later in the week with some tasty ideas for using cucumbers.  (In the meantime, our “How to be cool as a cucumber” post should help.)  And until then: some photos from the last month.

There are no tomatoes hiding under that snow, and even our cold-hardy crops like kale and collards have succumbed to the fiercest of winter’s frosts and geese.  But — after a gloriously warm and lazy trip to the Gulf Coast — we’re keeping pretty busy around here nonetheless!

For us, winter means seed orders and crop plans.  It’s a really creative time in our year: what crops are our stand-bys, reliable in production and taste?  What didn’t grow well?  What have we always wanted to try?  What varieties do our farming friends recommend?  Should we grow more melons this year?  Fewer turnip greens?  A new kind of tomato?

Winter means repairs and maintenance.  Our hoop house collapsed in that first big snow in December, and we’ll need to repair it before the season begins, since that’s where we put our vegetable seedlings to harden off before transplanting them into the fields.  We started construction on a small tool and repair shed last year, but found ourselves sidetracked by our busy CSA schedule and unexpected irrigation difficulties.  We’re hoping to get that built early in the season this year, before things get too busy.  We wrote a bit about those irrigation issues last year; that’s another big job to finish before the vegetables start growing.

Winter means doing our books, making sure we understand well how the business did last year, and using those lessons to make smart decisions about what directions to go this year.

Winter means finding the new season’s work crew.  Reading applications always fills us with excitement and hope.  Who will we spend our days with this year?  How will the farm change with their energy?  And ain’t it grand, that there are folks out there who want to do what we do, grow delicious food and get to know the people who eat it?

Winter means lots of planning and preparation for market and for our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription program.  Spots are filling up; have you sent in your registration form yet?

Winter also means lots of hot chocolate, lots of snuggles with Arlo, and lots of time by the wood stove.

We hope these last months have been good to you all, and we can’t wait to see you again.

Now that we’ve got some good fencing up, Luanne the Goat doesn’t have to be on her tether anymore.  She is celebrating her freedom … by holing up in the chicken coop with the broody hen.

I do not, as a matter of course, talk about our flock!  We’re vegetable farmers, after all.  Around here you’ll see a gaggle of greens, a bevy of beets, a passel of potatoes.  That’s it!  We grow things without legs.

Well, okay — we’re completely hooked on chickens for eggs and laughs.  And we like raising meat chickens, just enough for our own freezers.  And we love to daydream about a family dairy animal — but that’s a lot of milk!  And the winter is coming!  And the baby is coming!  And we like to take vacation sometimes!

As farmers, it’s good to be practical.

But sometimes, you gotta go with your gut.  So: please join me in welcoming the newest member of our little farm family.  She doesn’t have a name yet.  She’s a Nubian/Pygmy cross who was intended for our freezer (and that is where the little fellows who came with her ended up).  But instead Ali is outside building a milking stand and I am inside searching for a gal pal for her and we are all grinning and rubbing our bellies, looking forward to lots of tasty milk.