Kitchen Season

I made the mistake the other day of referring to this as our "off-season" in front of Noah.  Even before he said a word, his look pointedly reminded me how many times already this week we had acknowledged that there were more "big goals" listed for the week than were remotely possible to finish, each of them absolutely critical.  At yet.....in these first few Fridays after the market season ends, I think we particularly relish the absence of the intense deadline of getting to market, getting set up, pushing to harvest everything we can regardless of short days or cold.  We're still working well into Friday evening, but when I peer into the shop, Noah has the news on, working on building the custom windows for ventilation and light for the newest (and possibly most-hipster) chicken barn.  He admits to being tired but he seems, well, slightly relaxed.  It's an odd feeling for a Friday night, at least for small market farmers.  

I guess it can't be "off season" if you have three or four pallet bins of carrots to harvest, wash, and pack. With frozen tops, and the remaining beets a total loss, this fall's storage root harvest wasn't quite how we wanted it to be, but we didn't stay down about it long. We had to pause to appreciate the fact that this *one* bin represented more carrot pounds than we had ever had on-farm at this point in the season before. Maybe at least we got a bit better at growing them this year, and you can bet that next year we'll get them in safe and on time.

It went over better when I referred to it as "kitchen season" this morning, as we were enjoying  bowl of hot cereal that had simmered slowly with chunks of squash, apples, cinnamon and ginger (squash really is in three meals a day, and this is one of my favorites).  In the height of the growing season we tend to barge into the kitchen with armloads of veggies, and chop, shred, and/ or sauté them in a flurry of activity that shoots us straight back out the door to the fields, to grow some more. You would not believe the piles of dishes that build up in a farm kitchen in June.  As fall and winter set in, we cook a little slower, and occasionally actually wash *all of* the dishes (an activity now referred in our household as "Patty Baker-ing" in honor of how tidy our kitchen is when my sister visits each summer, and cheerfully cleans up after all of us, no matter how many family, crew members, and visitors there might be).  

We hope you are embracing some kitchen season too, perhaps with baked potatoes, roasted squash, slow-cooking soups, and time for a little more conversation.  And we want you to know that despite all that cold, we can still barely fit everything into the farmstore (especially as we wait for a replacement part for one cooler). Our carrots were salvageable, as it turned out, and after several days of cold digging and even colder washing, we have plenty of super-sweet carrots for everyone.  There was a little heartbreak, as most of them did need to the top 2-3 inches, where frost had destroyed the texture (and the store-ability), removed.  So, I guess we have topless carrots, how racy!  And instead of being ushered en-masse into their bulk bags, with us just scanning for bad spots, you can know that each and every carrot this winter was picked up and individually inspected by one of your farmers. Sometimes two of your farmers, when I would annoyingly check Noah's work.  Thank goodness for Toby this week, who put in some long carrot washing and trimming shifts with us--the whole thing was so much faster with three.  But it's not just storage crops and roots in the farmstore; we made sure to take a window of the non-frozen Friday afternoon to cut some fresh greens: cooking spinach, Asian mix, baby romaine lettuces, boc choi, baby boc choi and tatsoi are in the farmstore now, for Saturday visitors.  The cast of greens will rotate a bit more in this portion of the year than during the peak season, but we will almost certainly have something fresh and green for you.

Members, remember that this week (Saturday through Friday) is the final week for feedbag fill-ups!  But we hope it won't be the last week we see you, as we still have plenty of good stuff to keep the farmstore stocked, and you can continue to shop with you member discount through the end of the year.   

A favorite fall dish: a squash casserole from the original Moosewood cookbook. Kitchen season feels also like a time for connecting with loved ones, and I was reminded as I picked up our well-worn copy of that veggie-loving cookbook, that it was a g…

A favorite fall dish: a squash casserole from the original Moosewood cookbook. Kitchen season feels also like a time for connecting with loved ones, and I was reminded as I picked up our well-worn copy of that veggie-loving cookbook, that it was a gift from my parents, the note from them dated Christmas, 1999. My mom instilled in me the habit of making notes in my cookbooks, and this has an early 2000 note pencilled in "combination sounds odd, but it's really good." The cooked squash, yogurt, feta cheese, peppers, onion, and garlic really do blend beautifully together in this dish. It goes perfectly with a spinach salad and warm pita bread. Leftovers make a perfect pizza sauce, too! The whole recipe is in our squash guide printed up in the farmstore.

We didn't quite get to the potato washing during our thawed-out window today, so we'll have that root washer running again sometime tomorrow, when water is thawed. Depending on when you stop in, you might see that, or see progress on the latest chicken barn, or take a peek at the class of 2020 laying hens who are eager for that barn to get finished.

And speaking of laying hens....we are sorry for all of you who have come to the farm hoping for eggs, only to find the shelves empty.  We are down to about 8-10 dozen per day, and there are simply far more egg-loving people out there right now than we can supply.  The new barn, the larger flock, are all part of the strategy for solving that problem, but please have some patience as we work on it.  It's slow food, and these new ladies have another 3 moths or so to go before they really help much!