What a pleasure, then, that fall vegetables taste so good this way.

Hearty Potato Soup with Kale
adapted from Simply in Season

This hearty soup is just the thing for these early autumn nights.  Slurp it with a big hunk of crusty bread or alongside a fresh fall salad.  A mug of warmed cider is optional but highly recommended.  You can get most of what you need right out of your CSA share or off our market table, and you can find the rest at market too.  It’s a soup for right now.

As with most soups, you’ve got a lot of wiggle room here.  You could use spinach instead of kale – but we’re not growing spinach right now!  Use an onion or a leek.  Water, vegetable broth, and chicken broth all work great here.  Add more potatoes for a really thick soup.  Blend completely, before or after adding the kale, if you like a really smooth soup.  Add extra garlic if you want!  You get the idea.

1 tablespoon butter or olive oil
1 large onion, chopped, or 1 leek, roots and toughest greens removed, thinly sliced
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large potatoes or 4-5 smaller potatoes (about 1 1/2 lbs), diced
5 cups water, vegetable broth, or chicken broth
1/2-3/4 lb kale, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt or to taste
black pepper to taste

In a large pot, melt the butter or warm the olive oil over medium heat.  Add the onions and sauté until they begin to soften, and then add the garlic and sauté for another minute.  Add the potatoes and enough water or broth to cover by an inch or so – probably about half the broth.  Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are soft.  When the potatoes are almost done, warm the remaining water or stock in a separate pot.

Using an immersion blender, carefully blend the soup until it thickens but some chunks of potato remain – or, ladle out about half the vegetables and set aside, pureé the rest of the vegetables and the cooking liquid in a blender or food processor, and then return everything to the pot. Add the kale and the remaining (and now warmed) water or stock and cook until the kale is soft.  Add salt and pepper.  Taste to see if you need to adjust any seasonings, and serve!

And now, the last week (or maybe two) in pictures!

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?

Oh, yes, we do.  They make so much of the work on the farm so much easier … including digging potatoes.  Here you can see the potato plow, or middle buster, attached to our Kubota’s 3 point hitch, doing exactly what it was designed to do.  After Ali did passes down a few of the beds, Claire and Shannon came behind with bins and strong backs to harvest the spuds.

That’s fifty pounds of gorgeous Kennebec potatoes right there.  Farm work will make you think everything is beautiful and also give you muscles of steel.

These are the first potatoes of the summer.  (And how wonderful is this sun??) We dug them up this morning and into the Week 3 shares of the CSA they’ll go!  They’re a little larger than typical new potatoes but just as fresh and delicious.  The skin is delicate and thin, and doesn’t need to be peeled.  They make a wonderful potato salad.  Try tossing the potatoes in a pesto or basil vinaigrette made with the basil from your share!  And consider substituting shaved or finely chopped fennel in place of your normal celery!

If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at potato gnocchi.  We made it for the first time last week using this recipe, and topped it with summer squash, diced and then sautéed in brown butter.  It’s not difficult, but it does take some time.  We used one large baking potato and a handful of new potatoes and it was amazing.

This year we’re growing Red Pontiacs, Kennebecs, and Yukon Golds.  We’ll leave most of them in the ground till late summer, but we couldn’t resist digging up a few this week.  Try them!