What's in the box?

garlic scapes
red romine lettuce (large and medium only)
red pearl onions
spinach
french breakfast radishes (large and medium only)
broccoli
lacinato kale
arugula
salad mix
butterhead lettuce
herb pot

Notes on the box

Still a lot of greens in these early season boxes. We hope that you are enjoying having meals where salads fill up the majority of your plate. And that you have been able to work greens into your everyday quick meals. Add extra lettuce to wraps and sandwiches. Serve chicken or tempeh on a bed of lettuce. Morning eggs on top of spinach. Chopped kale or broccoli can be thrown in with the cooking water of macaroni for the last few minutes when cooking pasta, and you can have instant kale mac and cheese! We've been loving seeing all the salads people have been enjoying on our instagram feed! Keep them coming!
Garlic Scapes are a wonderful once per year treat that might be new to some of you. The scape is the stem of the flower that the garlic sends up at this point in it's development. We remove the scapes to help the garlic bulbs put more energy into the bulb so we get bigger heads of garlic later on. And these scapes are SO GREAT! They will keep for several weeks in your crisper if it takes you a while to get through them all. They can be used as you would a green onion, but they will add a garlic flavor. Or you can use them in place of garlic cloves. Eating with the season!
Radishes will store best and stay nice and crunchy if you remove the green tops from the radish. Both can be stored in plastic bags. The greens are edible as well. You can add them to the Arugula in a pesto with the garlic scapes (see recipe in last weeks blog but use scapes in place of green garlic.
Herb pots mostly have mint and Thai basil. The Thai basil was used instead of Italian basil when we had very poor germination on the Italian basil. You can use the Thai basil as you would any other basil, it will just have a stronger floral taste to it. We will be putting Italian basil from the fields in future boxes. You can pot out the herbs into bigger pots to let them grow larger or into your yard. Be warned - the mint will spread and you will likely have a large mint patch that can take over gardens. Don't plant it anywhere that it would be a problem later. Small herb pots have thyme or parsley or basil or mint.

All your greens-and broccoli- will store best in open plastic bags in your crisper drawer. Everything in the box needs to be refrigerated. Limp greens will perk up again after a soaking in a sink of cold water. All greens are washed, but we suggest another rinse just to be sure you don't end up with any grit in your food.

Recipes

favorite snack
Spread Quark cheese or butter onto slice of baguette. Top with sliced radish and a sprinkle of black pepper. Best snack ever.

Roasted Radishes
If you don't like raw radishes or find them too spicy, try them roasted! Remove tops, slice them in half, toss them with about 1 tablespoon of olive oil and some salt and pepper. Arrange them cut-side down on a sheet pan (a cast iron skillet is also good) and roast at 450°F for about 10 to 12 minutes. Remove when the cut side is browned a little, but they're still firm inside. Sprinkle with salt, finely chopped green garlic or garlic clove, and some minced parsley.

Vinaigrette Recipes from Bon Appetit

Miso Tumeric Dressing - a favorite around here to do on salads or drizzle on cooked veggies

Baked Kale Chips

Cosmic Wheel Creamery Farmstead Cheese Shares

This week is Quark. Quark is a soft cheese similar to chevre, but made from cows milk. Besides the above favorite snack, it's also nice with some pesto mixed or herbs mixed into it and spread on crackers, wraps, sandwiches, or dropped onto scrambled eggs at the end of cooking. You can mix herbed quark into warmed drained pasta for an instant tangy, creamy sauce. OR you can bake with it or serve with berries. It's very versatile and will keep in the fridge for 2 weeks or more. If you won't get to it in that time, it freezes pretty well.

The aged cheese this week is called Draco. It's based on a Romano recipe. Great to finish a pasta dish or to snack on. These handmade long aged cheeses often have spots of mold creeping into the paste. It's the nature of the natural rind. Trim off these spots and enjoy the rest!

On the Farm

Thanks so much for your patience last week as our email server went down! First week of delivery was a pretty stressful time to have it happen, but in farming we have learned that we can't get too stressed out about things that are totally out of our control. We hope you all found your boxes easily. Please remember every week to take the box labeled with YOUR NAME. If you have any issues, contact your drop site host or the farm.

Our local farmers do a baby sitting coop and kids from several local farms are at Turnip Rock on Thursday. We will do our very best to answer your questions, emails, and phone calls right away, but there might be a delay in getting back to your or some joyful noise in the background of phone calls!

Did you know your farmers were featured in Acres Magazine this month? Our friend, fellow farmer, and neighbor, Andrew French did a really nice write up about our farm and resilience. Acres isa farming publication that we have used as a reference since beginning our farming journey. It's such an honor to have Andrew write about our farm for this magazine.

This week Otto was a superstar in the field bunching onions and cutting lettuce and helping out in the cheese room with putting labels on the quark containers. This time of year is the height of activity on the farm with seeding, planting, harvesting, and weeding all being done at the same time. The long hours of daylight are totally necessary for the amount of work that needs to be done. We thank you for your support in allowing us to do the work that we love!