But don’t do that!  Just try making some.  We think you might never go back to store-bought.

This (plus a blender and about five minutes) is all you need:

mustard, canola oil, olive oil, lemons, salt, eggs

Convinced yet?

It’s good on everything.  Is there a more perfect midsummer lunch than a tomato sandwich on a couple slices of multigrain with some basil leaves and a few smears of fresh mayo?  You can add a fried egg or a couple slices of cheese but that’s gilding the lily.

And of course it’s fantastic on summer barbecue salads of all ilk: potato, egg, chicken, tuna.  Last week we made a potato salad with Yukon Gold potatoes, minced scallions, minced parsley, finely chopped sweet pepper, salt, pepper, and homemade mayo.

Quite often we smear it on half a hard-boiled egg for a mid-morning snack, or (ahem) even just sneak a fingerful from the jar.  Arlo loves it too!

Ali is the resident mayo maker around here.  He stresses that it’s a very forgiving recipe!  This is how he does it:

Whir together in the blender or food processor for a few seconds two eggs, some dried or jarred mustard, the juice of a lemon or a roughly equivalent amount of vinegar, and a bit of salt. Then, while still blending, add about 1 1/2 cups oil (usually equal parts extra virgin olive oil and a mild oil like canola) in a slow stream, and process until it reaches a consistency you like.  Add a bit more oil if it doesn’t seem thick enough.  You can also stir in more lemon juice, mustard, salt, or pepper at the end to taste.  Refrigerate and use within a week.

A few notes:

This recipe halves easily.

The eggs and oil emulsify best when the eggs are at room temperature.

We love adding flavor to the mayo: a bit of chipotle pepper in adobo sauce is our favorite, and fresh herbs or flavored vinegars are also very good.  Add garlic and it becomes aioli!  We add any extras with everything else in the beginning, before adding the oil.

If you’re so inclined, you can also make mayonnaise with a whisk and some elbow grease!  This will get you started.

You’ve seen the disclaimers on restaurant menus about raw and undercooked eggs and dairy, so here’s ours: raw eggs carry a small risk of salmonella contamination, so read up on the issue and decide whether you feel comfortable using them.  We do.  We use very fresh eggs from our own chickens, and recommend that you seek out eggs from healthy pastured birds if at all possible.  Here are instructions for pasteurizing eggs at home should you want to do that.  Be sure to refrigerate your mayo immediately.

]]> http://frogbottomfarm.com/2010/07/16/we-%e2%99%a5-homemade-mayo-a-lot/feed/ 0 http://frogbottomfarm.com/2010/07/01/an-early-summer-recipe-roundup/ http://frogbottomfarm.com/2010/07/01/an-early-summer-recipe-roundup/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:32:23 +0000 Lisa http://frogbottomfarm.com/?p=1238 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?

Here at Frog Bottom last Friday:

Miles and Katie and Shannon and Ali hunched over the cucumber rows, plucking the mature ones from the undersides of the vines and filling their buckets for the weekend farmers market and CSA pick-up. It was a sticky sticky day, like all the days have been of late.

I ate my first cucumber salad of the season: two or three cucumbers halved lengthwise and sliced, minced scallions, minced parsley, olive oil, lime juice, feta cheese, salt and pepper.  Easy, fast, and unbelievably delicious.  We eat some iteration of this salad as often as possible during the summer!

And Arlo tried his first cucumber.  Tasty enough, he decided, but also really fun to squish between your toes.

* * *

Last July we wrote a post called “How to be cool as a cucumber” — definitely worth another look during these sweltering first days of summer.  Hie thee!  Learn a bit about the cucumber’s origins, learn about the different varieties we grow, and get some recipe ideas, including our go-to cucumber salad recipe, easy fridge pickles, and even a cucumber cocktail!

(Here’s Shannon showing off an Asian cucumber.  It’s a bit funny looking, to be sure, but it’s our favorite. Read all about it!)

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!

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!

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?

This here is one gorgeous Small Wonder spaghetti squash.  Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake it cut side down in a casserole dish with a little water until it’s yielding and soft, about an hour.  Then take a fork and scrape through the flesh to get long spaghetti-like strands!  It’s good with olive oil, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper — and delicious with tomato-based sauces.

This here is also an invitation.  When the 2009 growing season began, we anticipated throwing a monthly potluck for CSA members, market customers and friends.  Well, somewhere between endless rows of tomatoes, hundreds of feet of irrigation pipe, thousands of pounds of potatoes, many miles of road driven to and from market and CSA pick-ups, and this whole fixin’-to-have-a-baby thing … that didn’t happen.

But we’d like to get at least one potluck in before season’s end!  This is late notice, but you are all very warmly invited to come on out on Sunday, September 27, at 1pm, for an informal potluck and farm tour.  Please bring a dish to share.  Little ones are of course very welcome!   No pets, please.  Please call or email to RSVP.  We’ll email directions toward the end of next week.

It’s a great weekend to explore the whole area, too!  Ride in the Heartland is an incredible event happening that Saturday and Sunday in Charlotte County, with bike tours for folks of all abilities, and lots of options for non-riders as well.  And on Saturday afternoon from 1-4, our friends Copeland and Christoph are holding an open house to share the incredible work they’ve done building an off-the-grid prefab house just down the way from Frog Bottom.  Consider making a weekend of it!

When we heard news of the late blight that swept much of New England and the mid-Atlantic this summer, our hearts just about fell out of our chests for the farmers up there.  Late blight is a fungus that destroys tomato plants and can also spread to potatoes; it spread like wildfire in the Northeast this summer.  It’s awful to imagine a summer without tomatoes.  And tomatoes are quite often a vegetable farmer’s bread and butter — a summer without tomato income is a very, very scary thing.

Luckily, Virginia seems to have been mainly spared, and we’ve got some gorgeous ones for you in the CSA and at market right now.  I always say you should eat tomatoes like there’s no tomorrow.  Nothing tastes like a vine-ripened tomato in the thick of summer, and their season comes but once a year.  This year, I’m eating them with an extra grateful heart.

We’re growing eight kinds of tomatoes at Frog Bottom this year, a mix of heirloom and home garden hybrid varieties.  All are thin-skinned and delicious.  I really am hard-pressed to pick a favorite — but if I must, I’ll always reach for a Cherokee Purple first.  That’s the purple one I’m touching in the photo above.  Let it ripen as long as you can stand it (at room temperature — never in the fridge), till it’s a deep dusky purpley-pink.  It’s amazingly sweet but with a nice balanced acidity.  It’s a natural for slicing and eating as is or in a sandwich.

Stop by the farm any day at lunchtime and you’ll likely find Ali and me both with sticky tomato juice running down our forearms and a bit of a homemade mayonnaise mustache.  Can you think of a better way to celebrate the season?

Here are our favorite ways to eat tomatoes right now; all require pretty minimal preparation and let the natural intensity of the tomato shine through.

Sliced and doused with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper. When we want to gild the lily we add basil leaves and fresh mozzarella.

Sliced and stuffed into a simple sandwich of toast slathered with homemade mayo. We haven’t bought mayo in ages.  It’s fast and easy to make your own, and once you start, you’ll wonder who kept this secret from you your whole life.  To make your own mayo: Blend one room temperature egg, some dried or jarred mustard, the juice of one lemon or a roughly equivalent amount of vinegar, and a bit of salt in the blender or food processor for a minute or two.  Then add oil (we usually mix equal parts olive and canola, but experiment to see what you like) — usually about 3/4 cup — in a very slow stream while still blending, until everything is emulsified.  Our mayo tends to be thinner than storebought, but you can add more oil if you’d like it thicker — or a bit of water or milk or cream if you want it thinner.  You can also stir in more lemon juice, mustard, salt, or pepper at the end to taste if you want.  Put whatever you don’t use right away into a tightly sealed jar in the fridge and use within a week.

Coarsely chopped and roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt for an hour or two or three. It can be hard to turn on the oven these days, but we’re always glad we did.  Slow roasted tomatoes are like candy.  Toss them with pasta, add them to a salad, smear them on toast with goat cheese, or just stand there at the stove and eat them all right out of the roasting dish.  Roasted tomatoes freeze very well.

Tomato bread salad. Tear or slice some chewy, slightly stale bread into rough 1-inch chunks, toss with olive oil, and bake until crispy.  Toss with halved garlic cloves, chunks of tomato, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and some basil or other fresh herbs.  Let the whole thing sit for about ten minutes and then dig in.  Avoid the garlic cloves.  Or not.  We first started making it when we read about it several years ago on Molly Wizenberg’s food blog Orangette.  We can’t recommend this website heartily enough for its wonderful storytelling and its no-nonsense, always-delicious recipes.

Panzanella. Tomato bread salad’s slightly fancier cousin — a bread salad that originated in central Italy.  Here are two delicious versions, one at Kitchen Parade and one at Chocolate & Zucchini.

And if you can’t eat  your way through all the tomatoes: freeze ‘em!  They’re slightly more accommodating when you use them later, if you blanch, peel, and coarsely chop them first.  But when we don’t have time for that we throw them into Ziploc bags whole.  Then we use them in sauces and casseroles in the winter.

And what about y’all??  Please leave a comment and tell us how you eat your tomatoes!

And now, here’s Teri!

I have always looked at my Californian family and friends with a touch of envy.  Don’t get me wrong; I love Virginia and plan to live here until I’m pushing up daisies.  It’s just they seemed to have the advantage of having large groups of like minded people working together for the common good.  I remember reading about a CSA there and thought — that would be so amazing, to pick up a box of produce and try to figure out what everything was and what to do with it. I really liked how it changed the dynamic of what’s for dinner.  Instead of trying to figure out what to make (you know most people recycle the same 10 meals over and over and over = boring) you have all this stuff and just have to figure out what to do with it.  That’s where the fun begins!  Zucchini tart = amazing.  Summer squash and cornmeal pizza crust = not so much — but at the very minimum, not the same old thing again!

Me hosting a pick-up happened completely by accident.  I went to a hooping workshop (as in hula hoop) at the Carver Healing Arts Center and saw a brochure for Frog Bottom Farm.  It was beautiful.  I left it there because it was the only one and thought, I hope I can remember that name.  A couple of days later I looked it up online, and amazingly, they were looking for a Midlothian pick-up.  I flipped out.  I was so excited at the prospect of hosting.  Not only would this really cool thing be happening in Midlothian, but I would be a part of it!  My California friends and family (who by the way are Midlothian transplants) thought it was really awesome too!

What I have found is there are like-minded people here and probably everywhere who want to eat locally grown, freshly harvested foods, and have a connection to the people who grow it.  They get excited about seeing what each week brings.  Some anxiously await tomatoes while others dream of ratatouille recipes.  I have noticed personally I didn’t eat enough vegetables.  And, when you do, you feel great!  I am so looking forward to the rest of the growing season.  The interesting people I have met.  The adventurous recipes I have yet to try.  They all make me look forward to each and every Wednesday with a smile and excitement so big I feel like I have to pinch myself.  What an awesome ride.

Below are two recipes from Teri that highlight ingredients you’ll find in your CSA share right now: zucchini and tomatoes.  The Zucchini Tart — which would be equally wonderful with any of our summer squash — tastes somehow fresh and rich at the same time.  Teri warns that “you’ve really got to be in the mood to look at and fool around with zucchini for quite a while –  it’s a labor of zucchini love!” and so she also offers a quick crowd-pleaser recipe for Tomato Pie.

Zucchini Tart with Feta

Adapted from a recipe in Saveur magazine, May 2006
Serves 6

Lynne Curry serves this tart by the slice from her stand at the Matakana farmers market in New Zealand.

1 10”x13” sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed and chilled
12 small zucchini (or other summer squash) (about 2 ½  lbs.), trimmed
Salt
3 Tbsp butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
10 cherry tomatoes (or better yet, Frog Bottom Farm tomatoes of equivalent amount), finely chopped, strained in a sieve, excess moisture pressed out
1 cup (4 oz) crumbled feta cheese
½ cup ricotta
2 Tbsp chopped basil
Freshly ground pepper
1 egg, lightly beaten

Preheat oven to 350°.

Fit pastry into a 9”x12” baking sheet, pressing it against the sides.  Score around bottom inner edge of pastry (beside crease where bottom meets sides), being careful not to cut all the way through, with a paring knife.  Prick bottom of pastry all over with a fork, line with a sheet of parchment paper that fits the bottom only, and fill with pie weights or dry beans.  Bake until edge of crust begins to puff and color, about 25 minutes.  Remove weights and paper.  Bake until bottom is golden, 6-8 minutes more.  Let crust cool.

Grate 4 of the zucchini on the large holes of a box grater into a large bowl.  Add 1 Tbsp of salt, toss well, and set aside to let weep for 30 minutes.  Transfer to a clean kitchen towel and wring thoroughly to remove moisture.

Meanwhile, slice remaining zucchini into ¼”–thick rounds.  Working in batches, blanch rounds in a large pot of boiling salted water for 1 minute.  Drain and spread out on a paper towel- lined sheet pan; set aside.

Heat butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Spoon out and reserve 1 Tbsp.  Add onions and cook until soft, 5-6 minutes.  Add grated zucchini and cook, stirring often, until just beginning to brown 5-7 minutes.  Transfer to a large bowl; let cool.

Stir tomatoes, half the feta, ricotta, basil, and salt and pepper to taste into zucchini mixture.  Stir in egg and spread mixture evenly in crust.  Arrange zucchini rounds, slightly overlapping in rows, like tiles on top.  Bake for 15 minutes, then brush the top with reserved butter.  Continue to bake until crust is deep golden, 10 minutes more.  Let cool to room temperature, then sprinkle remaining feta over top.  Cut into squares.

Tomato Pie

Frozen pastry crust
Tomatoes
Red onion
Basil
Hellman’s Mayonnaise – about a cup per pie
Shredded Mexican cheese blend – about 2 cups per pie

Preheat oven to 350°.

Slice tomatoes and onions in rounds and layer into the crust, sprinkling with fresh chopped basil — stopping to close your eyes, smell the basil and smile.

Mix the mayo and cheese into a paste –- sort of.

Press the mayo/cheese mixture on top of the pie. Decoratively add basil leaves.

Bake until gorgeous.

Try to wait ‘til it cools to eat it or it will be a mess –- but who cares? Make 4 of them and then you’ll be sure to have one to cool that will slice pretty.

We’re talking trips to the river, dinner outside at the picnic table, burgers and squash and corn on the grill, peach juice dripping down your arms, sweet tea and margaritas, the ice cream truck, ceiling fans, sprinklers, naps. And cucumbers!

Here at Frog Bottom we grow four kinds, enough to help you stay cool for a few weeks at least. We often sample the different varieties at market. If you’re a member of our CSA, be sure to try all the varieties before the season is through. The strange bumpy ones (see below) are our favorite.

About Cucumbers

Cucumbers are a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, which also includes summer squash, zucchini, watermelons, muskmelons, gourds, winter squash and pumpkins. Cucumbers originated in India and have been cultivated by humans for at least three thousand years, and possibly much, much longer – carbon dating places some seeds found near the Burma/Thailand border as being from 7750 BC! It’s said that the ancient Romans soaked their cucumber seeds in honeyed wine before planting them, in an effort to combat their fabled bitterness. In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites complain during their long exodus from Egypt: “Remember how in Egypt we had fish for the asking, cucumbers and watermelons, leeks and onions and garlic. Now our appetite is gone.”

Cucumbers spread slowly to Northern Europe, where the climate was not particularly suited to growing them, but they were readily adopted by native North American Indians when seeds were first brought by the Spanish conquistadors. Throughout the 1500s European trappers, hunters, and traders bartered with North American tribes for their fresh vegetables and fruits, including cucumbers. Letters from people who visited colonial New England in the 1600s praised the cucumbers and other kitchen garden vegetables there as being bigger and better than what could be grown in England at the same time.

One thing is certain: throughout all these millennia of cultivation, the bitterness has been almost entirely bred out of cucumbers. At Frog Bottom, we’re very careful to pick them while they’re still young – crisp and sweet. Their high water content and mild taste are what make them so refreshing on these hot, sticky summer days.

We grow four varieties here at the farm.

Here’s a pickler:

It’s called a pickler because it’s the perfect length for a canning jar, but this is a great all-around pickle for salads as well. In the bins at market and at CSA pick-ups, you can distinguish the picklers by their short, plump shape and their slightly bumpy skin.

This one, just slightly longer and smoother than the pickler and with slightly tapered ends, is our American slicer:

It’s another versatile cucumber, great on salads and sandwiches or just eaten out of hand.

This is a European burpless:

It’s very long and fairly thin, with smooth skin on the outside and almost no seeds inside. Very tasty!

Our favorite is the Asian cucumber:

It’s the ugly duckling of the bunch, with its wrinkled bumpy skin and funny shape, but what it lacks in classic beauty it more than makes up for with its crisp, sweet flavor. Try one!

Storing Cucumbers

We don’t wax our cucumbers – which means you don’t need to peel them! It also means they won’t keep as long as some store-bought varieties. Stick them in the crisper drawer of your fridge as soon as possible after buying them. Leave them there for up to a week but use them as soon as you can.

Preparing Cucumbers

We’ve chosen non-bitter varieties and we pick them young. So at our house, we never salt the cucumbers and rarely peel or seed them. It seems a waste of time and flavor when there are so many good things to do with them! We love them as a snack right out in the field while we’re picking. And of course they’re wonderful sliced or diced and added to salads and sandwiches. But we like them so much – and we’ve had such a bumper crop these last two weeks – that we love to dress them up a bit too.  Here are some of our old favorites, and a couple new approaches.

Ali’s Cucumber Salad

We make some variation on this salad two or three times a week during cucumber season. Don’t be afraid to play around with ingredients and quantities. It’s wonderful with wedges of fresh tomato and corn sliced right off the cob, both available at farmers markets now!

Several cucumbers (2 Asian or European, 3 American, or 4 picklers), chopped or sliced
3-4 scallions (minced) or half an onion (coarsely diced)
Handful basil leaves, chopped or torn
Handful feta or goat cheese, crumbled
Juice of half a lemon or a few glugs of your favorite vinegar
A few glugs extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl. Chow down!

Serves two with leftovers. Easily doubled.

Fridge Pickles

If, like me, you have been meaning to make your own pickles for what seems like a decade now, I am here to tell you: Get up from your computer this very instant and go to your kitchen! It takes about nine minutes! You make a simple brine of water, vinegar, and salt. Then you pour that over cucumbers, garlic, and herbs. Leave the jars alone for a few days, and voila! Pickles! I made them for the first time just last week, using this recipe from Donalyn Ketchum, and they are, in a word, perfect. Crunchy, garlicky, and just sour enough, I can’t stop reaching for them. These pickles aren’t canned, so they need to be stored in the fridge. They’ll keep at least a couple months there, but I doubt they’ll last that long! Also, you can use just about any herb. I meant to use dill but saw, as the brine was coming to a boil, that my dill had gone slimy. So I used fresh thyme instead. Yum!

Gordon’s Cup

If your work day has been relentless and nobody likes what you made for dinner and the A/C is broken, here’s what you need to do: make yourself a Gordon’s Cup. Cucumbers, lime, simple syrup, gin, and a pinch of salt: really, how can you go wrong? You’ll have to plan ahead just a little bit, to make and then cool the simple syrup, but that’s very easy. Make some now and it’ll last you through many of these drinks! Oh, and don’t skip the salt. Just a tiny pinch is really delicious. This recipe from Molly Wizenberg has everything you need to know.

Sautéed Cucumbers

The truth is, we haven’t tried this yet. I’m really eager to know if any of y’all have! Larousse Gastronomique includes several variations. Mark Bittman, author of the accessible, encouraging, and comprehensive How to Cook Everything, and writer of the weekly The Minimalist column in The New York Times, notes that a cucumber is “a vegetable that is rarely cooked but ought to be – at least occasionally.” He suggests a simple sauté of butter, onions, and cucumbers, finished with cream or yogurt and a handful of chopped dill. It’s next on our list; has anyone tried this?

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And you? What are y’all doing with cucumbers this summer? At market and at CSA pick-ups, people have told us about cucumber soup and tzatziki. We’d love it if you’d post those recipes – and everything else you’re making with cucumbers – right here in the comments section.