I like to think of kale as a gateway green: although it may look a bit intimidating with all those ribs and ruffles, it’s actually quite easy to love.  It’s delicious chopped quickly and thrown into the skillet with some olive oil and garlic, and sautéed until it’s bright green and a little bit tender.  Eat it just like that, or squeeze a bit of lemon juice on top.  That whole process takes 15 minutes, tops.

We’ve also won over many a kale skeptic with kale chips, also known as roasted kale or crispy kale. Kale chips are quick and completely addictive.  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 15 minutes, giving the cookie sheet a shake or two if you remember, until the edges get crispy.  We usually do a double batch.

Colcannon is delicious too.  This is a traditional Irish dish of potatoes and kale or cabbage.  A fun Halloween tradition is to hide a ring and a coin in the dish — whoever gets the ring will be next to marry, and whoever gets the coin is assured good fortune in the coming year!

Sautéed kale, kale chips, and colcannon are really so easy and so delicious, and so for a long time we were lazy about trying anything new.

But we just discovered something wonderful.  We’ve been growing kale for five years and yet this surprising little dish slipped quietly into our lives just last month.  But make no mistake: massaged kale salad is here to stay.

We’d come across the idea before but jammed it into an already crowded file folder of “stuff to try at some point.”  It might have languished there for years if not for my mom, who’s recently been exploring Mark Bittman’s suggestion to eat vegan until 6pm, a creative idea for improving your own health and for depending less on the unwholesome way most meat is produced in this country. Through her I discovered Choosing Raw, a website full of ideas for a natural, unprocessed, plant-based diet.  Gena, who writes the site, is cheerful and encouraging and never judgmental.  She makes me feel excited all over again about all the vegetables we grow.

So I was happy to give her raw massaged kale salad a spin, but I didn’t know how crazy we’d be for it.  Since we started making it in September, we’ve eaten it no fewer than three times a week.  It’s light and filling all at once.  And like a traditional green salad, there are endless possibilities.  Here are three we like.  Try it!

Basic Massaged Kale Salad

3/4 lb curly kale, chopped into 1-inch ribbons
2-3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
salt to taste
lemon juice
grated carrots
toasted sunflower seeds

Put kale in a large bowl.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.   Massage with your hands so that it’s well coated with the olive oil and it begins to wilt and darken, less than a minute.  Add the lemon juice (you might like up to a full lemon), grated carrots, and toasted sunflower seeds, and toss.  Yum! This is enough for two generous portions with some leftovers.  Doubles easily.

Massaged Kale Salad with Tahini-Apple Cider Vinegar Dressing

3/4 lb curly kale, chopped into 1-inch ribbons
salt to taste
1 Tbsp or so olive oil
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
juice of one lemon
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 Tbsp tahini
1-2 cloves garlic
2-3 dates, pitted
additional vegetables

Put the kale in a large bowl, sprinkle with salt, and drizzle with olive oil.  Massage with your hands until it begins to wilt and darken, less than a minute.  Set aside.  Put the apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, soy sauce, tahini, garlic, and dates in a blender or food processor, and process until smooth.  Taste the dressing; add more dates if it’s too tangy, or more apple cider vinegar if it needs a little more kick. Add about two tablespoons of the dressing to the kale, and massage again to coat.  Taste the salad at this point to see if you want to add more dressing.  Add any vegetables you like; we like grated carrots, sliced apples, golden raisins, and toasted sunflower seeds on this one.  Makes two generous portions with some leftovers. You’ll also have plenty of dressing left.  Store it in a jar in the fridge and use it on tomorrow’s kale salad!

Massaged Kale Salad with Avocado (our favorite!)

3/4 lb curly kale, chopped into 1-inch ribbons
2-3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
salt to taste
1 avocado
lemon juice
additional vegetables, nuts, seeds

Put kale in a large bowl.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.   Massage with your hands so that it’s well coated with the olive oil and it begins to wilt and darken, less than a minute.  Add 1/3 to 1/2 of the avocado, and massage again so that the avocado coats the kale like a thick dressing.  Dice the rest of the avocado and add it, along with the lemon juice and any other ingredients (try grated hakurei turnips, grated beets, or grated kohlrabi).  Toss.  Eat!

(Find more recipe ideas for greens here.)

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!

3 lbs 1 oz!

Autumn is really here!  Three cheers!  Another three!  Who else is with me?

We’re a bit crazy about fall vegetables, and what better way to begin talking about that than with this beautiful monster of a sweet potato?  Perhaps Deborah Madison says it best in her inimitable, indispensable Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone*: “Nearly every time I bite into a roasted sweet potato, I ask myself if anything can be more delicious.”

Sweet potatoes have a lot going on nutritionally: they’re chock full of Vitamin A in the form of beta carotene (which means they’re a great immune system boost, and help you see better too!), are a very good source of Vitamin C, and also contain a significant amount of fiber, iron, and potassium. Lots of their nutritional value is found just under the skin, so consider leaving the skin on when you cook or bake with sweet potatoes.  We don’t use any pesticides, so you can be sure the skins are safe to eat!  And remember, carotenes are fat-soluble.  This means it’s important to eat carotene-heavy foods with some fat, to fully digest and absorb all the good stuff.  So butter those sweet potatoes!

Storing sweet potatoes

We dug the sweet potatoes going into this week’s shares last week, and so they’re only partially cured. You can eat them right away and they’ll be delicious, but their sweetness will intensify if you cure them a few more days at home.  Just leave them in a box, covered with paper or heavy cloth, in the warmest place in your house, for up to a week.  After that, we suggest keeping them in a cool, dark location, ideally not the fridge.  Try wrapping them in some newspaper and putting them in a reasonably well ventilated cabinet or pantry closet.  They should last several weeks, but do be gentle with them. Despite their tough-looking skin, they’re not as rugged as regular potatoes.

Some of our sweet potatoes this year are pretty enormous!  Don’t be afraid of them.  If you slice off as much as you need, you’ll see a milky white fluid begin to appear.  This is naturally occurring latex! It will form a film over the exposed flesh, and will preserve the sweet potato for another couple days at least.  Generally raw sweet potatoes shouldn’t be stored in the refrigerator, but we sometimes do put them there after we’ve sliced off a piece, and we make a point to use the remaining sweet potato fairly quickly so it isn’t damaged by the dry cold.

Sweet potatoes come in all shapes and sizes — just like people!

Eating sweet potatoes

I grew up eating sweet potatoes smothered in marshmallows at the Thanksgiving table … and that was about it.  While I’ll gladly eat them that way even now, golly, I was missing out on so much!  Sweet potatoes are delicious just about any way you cook them: roasted, grilled, braised, steamed; whole, sliced, cubed, mashed, puréed.

Our favorite way to eat sweet potatoes is to slice them into thin rounds, toss with a few good glugs of olive oil, salt, and a few cloves of minced garlic, and arrange in a single layer or so on a cookie sheet. Bake at 400°F for about 15 minutes on one side, and then flip them and cook another 5 or 10 minutes, until they to start to caramelize at the edges.  So good!  We eat them this way a couple times a week but never time the cooking exactly, so do cook them a bit longer if they’re not caramelized yet.

Green things like kale and collards are a happy complement to the sweetness of sweet potatoes. Recently we’ve been eating these roasted sweet potato rounds, or baked sweet potatoes with butter, alongside a raw massaged kale salad (more on that soon in a few days!) and salmon fillets seared in our trusty cast iron pans.

They make wonderful casseroles, of course (savory and sweet), and are also great roasted right alongside chicken, pork, or beef.  They’re fantastic in stews — try a stew of sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and beans, seasoned with peanut butter, garlic, ginger, and cayenne, and served over rice or quinoa.  Puréed, they make an easy early baby food (puréed sweet potato freezes great) and a wonderful soup.  They’re also wonderful cubed and then steamed or roasted, and added to burritos or tacos with black beans and cilantro.

They’re a great addition to breads too!  We make a seriously good braided Hawaiian Sweet Potato Bread from a delightful little cookbook called Goddess in the Kitchen (we thought it was out of print, but it seems it’s just been repackaged as Romancing the Stove: Celebrated Recipes and Delicious Fun for Every Kitchen Goddess).  Last Thanksgiving we made these yeasted sweet potato rolls from James Beard via Joe Yonan at the Washington Post: heavenly.  We haven’t tried these sweet potato biscuits, but they look darned delicious as well.

Have you tried mashed or puréed sweet potatoes in pancake or waffle batter yet?  So good.  And sweet potato pound cake is out of this world.

Other things I’m itching to try: sweet potato gnocchi, a sweet potato soufflé with a bit of cayenne and some crumbled fried sage leaves on top, bread pudding with cubed sweet potatoes.  Ohhh, and how about a sweet potato milkshake with a bit of maple syrup??  Ahem.

One more cooking tip: try substituting sweet potatoes in any recipe that calls for other orange foods like carrots, pumpkin, or winter squash.  It almost always works!

—

* We participate in the Amazon Associates program. We earn a small commission if you buy any cookbooks by following our links.  We promise we will only link to cookbooks we know, trust, and love. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to know more.

(Sweet potato pound cake recipe below!)

Sweet Potato Pound Cake
adapted from Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott

We started making this pound cake in February 2009, right around the time I found out I was pregnant with our own little sweet potato.  Perhaps that explains why I ate that first one for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert till it was gone.  Perhaps not.  This recipe makes a big cake. You stand forewarned.

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 sticks butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 large sweet potatoes, baked until soft, peeled and mashed (you want 2 cups — eat the rest!)

Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Butter and flour a Bundt pan. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg and salt, and set aside. In a small bowl, combine the milk and vanilla, and set aside. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugars until they’re light and fluffy, and then add the eggs one at a time, blending well after each egg.  Add the mashed sweet potatoes and mix on low for about a minute. Add half the flour mixture and mix on low or with a wooden spoon until it’s just incorporated into the batter.  Now add half of milk, continuing to mix gently, then the rest of the flour, mixing gently again, and finally the rest of the milk, mixing gently until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 60-75 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. If you can bear it, let it cool in the pan on a rack for about 20 minutes before gently flipping it out of the pan and onto the rack.  Our friend Shari, who told us about this recipe, warned that it makes your kitchen smell like heaven.  Make some coffee while you wait.  Have your first cup while browsing the archives of this joy+ride, the lovely site co-curated by Shari.  When the cake has cooled just a bit, slice yourself a piece and take it, and the coffee, out to the porch. Exhale. Also makes a great breakfast toasted.

Two notes:

1) If you prefer, you can peel, cube, and steam the sweet potatoes, instead of baking them, before mashing them.  We prefer the sweetness that baking them brings, but either method makes a delicious cake.  We don’t recommend boiling sweet potatoes because they can become a bit waterlogged and also lose some of their nutrients.  (And we know you’re eating this cake for its nutrients.)

2) You can use two 8″x4″ loaf pans instead of a bundt pan.  The baking time will probably be shorter — keep an eye on the loaves and check with a tester.

Y’all, homemade mayonnaise is so easy, so cheap, and so delicious, you’re going to kick yourself for never having tried it before.

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.

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!)

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!

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!