Recipe: Beans with Crispy Sage

Sage lightly fried until it’s crisp and fragrant is a great addition to any veggie dish. We’ve got an overload of beans these days but fortunately these two go very very well together.

Ingredients:

- beans, enough to cover a pan in a single layer (careful not to fry too many beans at once or they will end up soggy and unevenly cooked*)

- handful of fresh sage leaves, stems trimmed off

- 1.5 tsp olive oil

- salt to taste

Steps:

1. Heat dry pan on high while prepping veggies. Make sure beans are thoroughly dry.

2. When pan starts to smoke lightly, add beans.

3. Stir beans frequently for about 1-2 minutes. When brown spots appear on the beans, remove to a plate. Do not let the beans blacken.

4. Drop the heat to low and let the pan cool. In the meantime, heat another pan to low-medium and add 1/2 tsp oil.

5. Add sage to oiled pan and fry until crispy, about 3-5 minutes. Remove from heat and cover to keep warm.

6. Add 1 tsp oil to the other pan that's been cooled down to low heat. Put the beans back on and cook about 10-15 minutes.

7. Mix beans and sage together and serve.

* For larger amounts of beans: Prepare in batches. Transfer batches from the pan after the high heat stage to a shallow dish in the oven at 300F and cook in olive oil for about 15 minutes (or until sufficiently softened).

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A Cooler And Some Self-Reliance

Having a cooler greatly increases farm efficiency as a whole. It allows for me to harvest and pack produce the day before delivery and keep it cool and fresh. Being able to refrigerate the boxes themselves is also a big advantage as this helps keep the veggies cool when they are on the road.

The cooler was specifically sized to accommodate the pre-packed delivery oxes.

In the future farm-of-my-dreams I would like to have a full size walk-in cooler. Time constraints this year meant compromise and so I ended up building a large cooler in the basement of the house. It's more than enough for this season as I'm starting out small but in a few years I'll have to re-evaluate. Fortunately, all the equipment in the current cooler can be reused someday when I build the walk-in version.

The other end of the 8 x 4 x 2 ft cooler features the air conditioning unit below and the Coolbot above.

The design for this cooler came from Ron Khosla, a fellow electrical engineer turned farmer. The basic idea is to force a compatible air conditioning unit to continue to cool below it's standard range. It's called the Coolbot and it's connected it to a simple window air conditioning unit as pictured above. The two devices, along with a wood frame and some polystyrene make up a very effective and energy efficient cooler. If I were to buy a pre-made cooler of this size I would have easily spent 10-20 times as much. I feel like there some harmony between the engineer's need to tinker and re-build and the farmer's desire for self-reliance and independence. In other words, farming is a good way to support my DIY habit.

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Recipe: Roasted Patty Pan Squash

Roasted Patty Pan Squash

I dream of this dish all through the long Canadian winter. Sunny yellow squash is sliced and roasted in the oven or under the broiler until the surface caramelizes and the inside is tender and just a little bit sweet. It's a fantastic side dish on it's own but can also be chopped up into smaller chunks after roasting and thrown into a summer pasta alongside tomatoes, sweet peppers and basil.

Ingredients:
- 1-2 patty pan squash, depending on size
- olive oil
- salt

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 450F if using bake method. No preheat needed if using broiler method.

2. Slice patty pans into roughly 1/2 inch thick slices.

3. Lay on cookie sheet on top of parchment paper, drizzle with olive oil and salt to taste. Ideally you shouldn't have to overlap any slices, but don't worry if you do, they will shrink a bit with cooking and then you can pack them more tightly together.

4. Either bake or set under broiler. Turn slices over when the surface is thoroughly browned and caramelized. This will take about 20 minutes per side on bake and 10 minutes per side on broil, depending on the thickness of the slices. Don't under-brown! The squash only gets sweeter and more tender the longer you cook so when in doubt cook more rather than less.

5. Enjoy the summery goodness on your plate!

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We Love Visitors!

We've been fortunate to have many visits from friends and CSA members throughout the summer. We encourage all our members to come by the farm and check it out!

8 year old Theo learns about where his food is grown.

Saying hi to the chickens with a passel of kids and CSA member Daron.

Christine and Eric discuss the veggies while Danny poses for a J. Crew catalog shoot.

Jon and Daron check out what's next to be harvested.

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Recipe: Kale Chips

Kale Chips

Kale is a veggie that's coming into it's own these days, a hot item in trendy restos and widely featured in foodie blogs. In fact, I think the foodie police will revoke your cultured taste buds if you don't have a go-to kale recipe. Kale rightly earns its praise by being highly nutritious, easy to cook, and supremely delicious. It stores well in the fridge and complements a wide variety of meals - I can find a way to add it to pretty much anything I'm making for dinner. This recipe is a super simple and very kid-friendly snack or side dish. I'll often add it on to a meal if it happens to have veggies the kids aren't into so I know at least they'll stuff their little faces with crispy kale chips.

Ingredients:

- handful of kale, stems removed and roughly chopped

- olive oil

- salt

Steps:

1. Use a paring knife to remove stems and slice into "chip-sized" pieces. This year we've grown black kale (left) and red Russian kale (right) and the latter's stems can be steamed until tender and eaten.

2. Spread kale pieces out on a cookie sheet, drizzle with olive oil and salt to taste.

3. Bake at 300F for about 10 minutes or until kale is crispy. Check it often as the time between "crispy" and "burnt" is vanishingly small.

4. Remove to a plate and let cool. Enjoy!

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Harvest Day

Mondays are harvest days here on the farm. They are probably the longest day of the week as Eric picks the fresh produce by hand, cleans it and packs it up into the delivery boxes that go out on Tuesday.

The process begins with rinsing out the blue harvest boxes on the screen table near the house.

The kids agitate for a trip out to the garden. We won't get in the way, we promise.

Next a walk out to the garden.

Sylvia learns to walk between the rows rather than trample everything in her path.

Eric picks basil for this week's share. It's hard work balancing speed and efficiency with the care required to keep the basil intact and in good shape.