It’s been way too long since we posted here. We hope to get some good stuff up quite soon. In the meantime, have a peek – or a long leisurely look, really! – at late summer and early autumn here at Frog Bottom. Click on any photo to see it bigger, if you like.

Coming soon: Soup! A cookbook giveaway! Our plans for 2012! Thanks for your patience.

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!

On days like this one, when our shirts are soaked through by 9am, it’s a real challenge to remember what it feels like to pull on socks, to see our breath in the morning air while we pick cabbage, to frost-proof the outdoor spigots before going to bed.

But it happens every year, and yesterday we started preparing. It was a long, hot, deeply satisfying afternoon: Ali and the crew filled thirty-two 300-foot rows with 2000 collard plants, 3000 kale plants, and 4000 broccoli plants.  As the sun dipped below the horizon we watered them well, to prepare them for today’s triple digits.  Tomorrow: 3000 cabbage plants.

We’ll do it all again in late August for generation two.

We’ll tend to them all with sweat and care, and we hope all these numbers translate into bountiful autumn CSA shares and market tables, with enough remaining for a possible winter CSA or winter market.

Ali often remarks that getting in a full planting is one of the most exciting things that happens on the farm. You start with long expanses of bare ground, a greenhouse full of seedlings, and a hefty dose of determination. You spend a whole bunch of hours moving back and forth, back and forth, planting, sweating, joking, planting, stopping for water, planting some more.  And then you slowly uncurl and stretch your back and shoulders and there it is in the setting sun: a field full of promise.

Any time (my dad) gets to eat greens — of any kind — two days in a row, he considers himself extremely lucky, and he is not alone. In 1984, at the annual Collard Festival in Ayden, N.C., a man named C. Mort Horst set a world record by eating seven and a half pounds of collard greens in 30 minutes. (However, it was reported that he kept them down just long enough to claim his prize.) A year later, a woman named Colleen Bunting contributed to an anthology devoted to collards called ”Leaves of Greens: The Collard Poems.” In one the poems, she addresses (a common) prejudice: “Some say collards don’t smell so nice,/ But eat them once, and you’ll eat them twice.”

– from Green Party by Julia Reed, New York Times

Some of you grew up with these broad-leaved beauties, but I’m sure there are others among you who have arrived home with your shares in recent weeks and thought, “Ummm … this is as big as my head.  What on earth is it?”

These are collard greens, and they’re delicious, and they’re good for far more than playing peek-a-boo with your baby — although I highly recommend that as well.

You’ve probably been told to eat yer greens and they certainly are nutritional powerhouses.  Collards are probably the best vegetable source of calcium, on par with milk cup for cup.  They’re also very high in Vitamins A and C, iron, potassium, niacin, and protein.

So, short of gnawing on the raw leaves, how do you get all that good stuff in your body?

Traditionally, collard greens are simmered for a looooong time with a ham hock or a hunk of slab bacon or salt pork until they’re silky soft.  They’re quite good like this, although the sour smell of this long cooking is unpleasant to some people.

They’re quite versatile though.  You can chiffonade them and sauté them with garlic in olive oil.  This takes less than five minutes and the greens taste bright and fresh. These short-cut collard greens resemble traditional collards, but you microwave the greens for about 5 minutes first, which cuts the cooking time significantly, and you add chopped bacon at the end instead of cooking the greens with the pork.  Of course, simmering collards in a pork-based stock gives them great flavor; mushroom stock is a great vegetarian option.  And if you’re open to trying them raw, how about collard wraps? This recipe is a great jumping-off point — you could fill collard wraps with all kinds of things!  If raw collards are too strong for you, you can blanch the greens for a minute or two first to mellow the flavor.  And of course, hoppin’ John and collard greens is a traditional Southern New Year’s Day meal for good luck!

Our very favorite way to eat collards comes from the quite irresistible The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners, via our friend Eunice. Eunice is a tireless cook with an impeccable palate and I am doing all I can do bring her to the farm for a week next year as a chef-in-residence.  Wouldn’t that be wonderful?  A gal can dream.  But right now, what we’ve got are her delicious collards.

Sneaky collards.

They’re so called because they have a wonderful spicy smoky flavor, but they’re cooked without pork. They’ve got no animal products in them at all, actually, so this is a great vegan dish.  Don’t let that deter the meat-lovers among you, though.  This is a fine, fine meal.  In fact, we’re having it for dinner tonight, so I’d better give you the recipe right now so that I can get cookin’!

We love to spoon a heap of sneaky collards over a big wedge of custard corn bread in a soup bowl. It’s fall in a bowl. We’re ready.

Sneaky Collards
adapted from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee

8 cups water
3 dried chiles or 1 Tbsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste
3 3/4 pounds collard greens, ribbed, washed, and cut into 1-inch ribbons
1 large onion, trimmed, peeled, and quartered
1 large tomato, cored and quartered, or 1 large can whole tomatoes (1 can diced tomatoes works in a pinch!)
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar, sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar
1 tsp Spanish smoked paprika (pimenton) or Hungarian paprika
3 cloves garlic, unpeeled
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

In a very large stockpot, bring water to a boil over high heat. Add the chiles and 1 Tbsp salt, and reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the stock has a nice salty spiciness, about 10 minutes.

Add a few handfuls of greens to the pot. They will float on the surface, so stir them frequently, submerging with the spoon, until they have turned a bright kelly green, 3 to 5 minutes. They will become floppy and more compact, so you can add more handfuls of greens. Continue adding handfuls of greens, stirring and submerging them until all the collards are in the pot (6 to 10 minutes). Turn the heat down to the gentlest simmer and note your time at this point.

While the greens simmer, place the onion and tomato in a small bowl. Drizzle olive oil and vinegar over them, add 1 tsp salt, the paprika, and the pepper, and toss to coat. Transfer the vegetables to a medium cast iron skillet (a cookie sheet or casserole dish works too) and add the garlic. Place the skillet under a hot broiler, about 3 inches from the flame or heating element, until the vegetables are nicely charred, 6 to 8 minutes. Set them on the stovetop to cool.

When the garlic is cool enough to touch, peel the cloves and discard the charred skins. Transfer the broiled onion, tomato, and garlic to a blender or food processor and blend at high speed until the mixture is completely smooth, about 3 minutes. You should have close to 1 1/2 cups of purée.

With a ladle, remove most of the stock from the collards pot and discard or save for soup. (Traditionally, you dip corn bread into this pot liquor left over after the greens are done.  It’s delicious for sure, and has lots of the vitamins and minerals that leach out of the greens when you cook them for a long time.)  Add the purée and continue to simmer the greens, for a total of 1 hour from the point at which you noted the time. The greens will be a very dark matte green and completely tender, bathed in pale red gravy.

Cut a generous wedge of buttermilk skillet corn bread and put it in the bottom of a soup bowl.  Ladle the collards on top.  Sometimes we also add an egg over easy.  Dig in!

Buttermilk Skillet Corn Bread
adapted ever so slightly from our trusty Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

You can make this corn bread without the cream if you like, and it’s still delicious.  But the cream, added just before you slide the skillet into the oven, magically transforms into a custardy layer just under the surface.  Vegan folks might like to give this recipe a spin.

3 tbsp butter
1 cup flour
1 cup stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
2 Tbsp sugar or honey
2 cups buttermilk (or 2 cups milk plus 2 or so Tbsp lemon juice or vinegar, left to sit for about 10 minutes to curdle)
1 cup cream

Preheat the oven to 375°F.  Put the butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet (a cake pan or a deep dish pie pan will work if you don’t have a cast iron skillet) and place in the oven while you get everything else together.  Sift the dry ingredients in one bowl and mix the eggs, sugar, and buttermilk in another. Remove the pan from the oven, brush the butter over the sides, then (carefully — the skillet is still hot!) pour the rest into the wet ingredients.  Combine the wet and dry ingredients, and stir long enough to make a smooth batter.  Pour the batter into the hot pan.  Gently pour the cream over the batter — don’t stir!  Gently slide the skillet back into the oven and bake until lightly browned and springy to the touch, 50-60 minutes.

Leftovers make an excellent breakfast!  We’re particularly partial to eating it with a fried egg and maple syrup on top.  Try it!

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!

There’s your intrepid Farmer Ali, and there’s our greens field all covered in snow.  It’s really something to behold!  We took a walk through the fields yesterday and crossed our fingers that it would begin to melt in time for this week’s CSA harvest.

But when Ali headed out to the fields early this morning, he discovered that this foot of snow makes for nigh-impossible picking.  Root vegetables like rutabagas and turnips are stuck firmly in the ground under compacted snow, and our greens and cabbages are almost completely invisible.

We’ve made the decision to postpone this final pick-up by one week, until next Wednesday, December 30.  So that means there will be no vegetable delivery this week at all, and we’ll bring everything next week instead — same place, same time.

We hope this will work out for everyone, and we really appreciate your understanding and patience.

People, we have been remiss.

We’ve been sending you home with bags full to bursting with collards, kale, mustard greens, turnip greens, chard, rape, and more every week for ages now … but when it comes to helping you scale those mountains of green — when it comes to telling you what you can do with them — our advice has been meager.

And that’s really too bad; we’re actually quite fanatical about the stuff, and it would be a shame to reach the end of a CSA season knowing we might have converted many a greens skeptic if only we’d provided recipes!

Greens are as good for you as you’ve always heard, chock full of iron and calcium and vitamin C and beta carotene.  They’re a great boost for your immune system as it fights everything from the common cold to, studies suggest, cancer.

But don’t force them down just because you should!  Greens are delicious and quite easy to prepare.  Although they span the flavor spectrum, from mustard’s potent spiciness to Red Russian kale’s surprising sweetness, they all take to the same basic preparation with ease.

We eat greens several nights a week this time of year.  Most of the time we chop them coarsely (with or without the stems, depending on our mood and our patience) and sauté them in olive oil with onion and garlic.  We usually eat them like that, or sometimes we add a couple glugs of balsamic vinegar or soy sauce, or a squeeze of lemon.  You can add almost any other vegetables to the sauté as well — in the early autumn, we thought two or three diced tomatoes added to the mix was particularly good.  Canned tomatoes would work just fine this time of year.

If you’ve got Red Russian kale (that’s the stuff with the purple veins and ruffled edges, at the very right edge of the photo above) here is what you must do: melt some butter in a wide skillet or a pot, and toss in a couple diced apples and a hearty amount of that kale.  A pound is not too much.   Cook until tender, stirring occasionally.  That’s it!  Unbelievably good.

Another idea is kale chips!  These win over lots of skeptics, but you’ll find yourself making them time and time again because they’re so fast and wonderful.  Arrange kale on a baking sheet in a single (or so) layer, toss with a little olive oil and salt, and bake at 375° for 10 minutes or so, giving the cookie sheet a shake or two if you remember, until the edges get crispy.  We usually do a double batch.

Two other greens recipes we love, both from the wonderful food blog Orangette:

Braised Winter Greens with Chickpeas, Onions, and Garlic Fast, and great with any greens.  Especially good with a poached or fried egg on top.

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade This isn’t complicated but it does take some time to come together — not a quick weeknight supper, but a great simple meal for a chilly weekend lunch or supper.  This is comfort food of the highest order, rendered from the simplest ingredients: greens, onions, garlic, bread, cheese, and broth.

We’ve got another favorite recipe on deck for tomorrow the first moment we can stop gazing at the baby.  In the meantime, what are your favorite ways to prepare greens?

Until we get our irrigation issues sorted out and until we get a little rain, we’re staying pretty busy watering by hand.  Everyone do their best rain dance for us?

Fall is here!  We grow loads of different kind of cooking greens: collards, curly kale, Red Russian kale, mild turnip greens, spicy turnip greens, curly mustard greens — and that’s only the beginning of the fall veggies!  It’s a scrumptious time of year.  Join us!

We’ll post some of our favorite greens recipes over the next few days.  How do you like to cook your greens?