Week 5

This week our half of the farm share included:

• Broccoli
• 1 head of radicchio
• 3 baby heads of lettuce (including romaine!)
• 1 bunch of beets 

The beets we roasted and will go in a salad with goat cheese. The romaine will be the basis of Mo's Caesar salad for lunches (with homemade croutons), and the broccoli (supplemented with more from the store) will go into a pasta with a pesto made from last week's garlic scapes. The remaining lettuce and radicchio will be for salads of one sort or another.

Week 4

Each year, strawberry season is a triumphant but ever so brief start to the farm share. Alas, the strawberry fields  at the Pennington location have closed and, with hot weather, there were not enough berries at the Chesterfield location to allow us to have a second large pick at that location. As a result, the haul this week was a little less than usual for this time of year. We got:

• 1 bunch of garlic scapes
• 2 zucchini
• 1 bunch of kale 
• 2 heads of lettuce

The scapes we made into a pesto for later use as a pasta sauce.  The zucchini we grilled on our two-burner cast iron grill pan. The lettuce and kale are as of yet still unused. Here's to hoping for a bigger haul next trip. 

Week 3

This week we had a choice of white turnips or bok choi (we took bok choi), 2 heads of lettuce, and half a pound of spinach. In the Pennington pick-your-own fields we (for our half of the family share) also got 1 quart of sugar snap peas and 2 quarts of strawberries. However, Mo, Silvia, Tricia, and I then drove down to the Chesterfield farms where we could pick another 8 quarts of strawberries for the family share, for a total of 12 quarts of strawberries this week.

Naturally, we made jam.

Learning from last year's jam making, we made low sugar jam (though fewer places sell low sugar pectin that you might think.  We then made two variations: strawberry-rhubarb jam and strawberry-balsamic jam with thyme. Right now, we have 18 pints of jam cooling and (hopefully) setting up on our kitchen table. The jam with balsamic vinegar is adapted from a recipe with full sugar pectin, so we'll just wait and see how it sets, but worst case scenario it will be an awesome sauce for duck, ice cream, etc.

Later this week we'll also be making stir fry with the bok choi and snow peas, along with a few other ingredients picked up from the store.