May 12, 2010: This week’s featured fruits and vegetables are: Asparagus, rhubarb, radish, spring onions, spinach, salad mix, head lettuce, herb (chives with flowers – which are edible). And an extra bag of rhubarb for everyone – it is going strong.

Recipes:

We will attempt to give you recipes for unfamiliar vegetables. Please send me any recipes you wish to share.

If you go to Epicurious.com and type in a mix of ingredients (kale, collards, mushrooms, onions, etc.) you will get many recipes. Epicurious has over 850 recipes for rhubarb alone. We also have some favorites on our Recipes page, Click here.

At this time of year, we get lots of greens. In general, you can wash and chop any combo of leafy greens (kale, spinach, collards, even radish and beet greens) and saute them in olive oil and garlic for just a couple minutes. Just long enough to wilt them. Then sprinkle them with balsamic vinegar or lemon. Takes five minutes and is a great vegetable dish. A reminder that eating cruciferous vegetables raw is a thyroid inhibitor. So if you have slow thyroid function, you should cook them first.

If you get more than you can eat in a week of something like greens, they store well. Either wash and spin them and store in the frig in a salad spinner where they will last a week for sure or clean them up and get excess water off and freeze. You can also steam them slightly and freeze them in bags. They are great added later to soups and casseroles.

Here is Farmer Pam’s suggested recipe for cooking radishes.

Sautéed Radishes with sugar snap peas
Adapted from Bon Appetit, April 2004

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter                    2 cups thinly sliced radishes
1 tablespoon olive oil                  ¾ cup orange juice
½ cup thinly sliced shallots          1 teaspoon dill seed
12 oz sugar snap peas                1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

Directions

Trim and remove strings from peas.
Melt butter and oil in a skillet over medium heat.   Add shallots and sauté until golden, about 5 minutes.
Add peas and radishes, and sauté until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes.
Add orange juice and dill seeds, and sauté 1 minute.
Season with salt and pepper, and stir in chopped dill.
Transfer to a bowl and garnish with extra dill if desired.

Food for Thought

We also like  to give you resources to connect the dots between the CSA experience and living in a local, more sustainable way.

Book recommendations include Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) (2007) and any books by Michael Pollan, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Another good one is Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean and Fair, by Carlos Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement.

And lately there are many good documentaries out on the subject of a local food system. Scroll down to see trailers.

Some very interesting people to read about in the movement are Joel Salatin and Will Allen.
There are many other heroes. Feel free to share your favorites with us.

Sometimes we will provide you with an opportunity to advocate on behalf of independent farmers like ours. In case you are interested, a good advocacy site for organic food is Organic Consumers.