The News from Windflower Farm
What you’ll get this week
- Eggplants
- Tomatoes
- Sweet peppers
- Green Romaine lettuce
- Spinach
- Radicchio
- Sweet corn
- Various summer squashes
- Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s ‘Zest Star’apples
Next week’s share will include carrots, green beans and spinach.
News from the farm
According to the Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog, “the mildly bitter flavor of radicchio adds a nice touch to mixed salads.” The variety that we are sending this week is called ‘Virtus,’ which is a Sugarloaf type. Our Fedco Seeds catalog says that it “looks like Romaine crossed with Napa cabbage.” On her Lopez Island Kitchen Gardens blog, Debby Hatch says, “to cook it, I’ve braised the outer leaves in olive oil and garlic and served them as a side dish or as part of a pasta sauce. She has “also sliced the heads in half, brushed them generously with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and ground black pepper and grilled them.” Radicchio goes well with pears, nuts and Gorgonzola cheese, and with sherry or red wine vinaigrette.
It’s not much fun when things don’t work as they are supposed to. We awoke on Monday morning to find our cooler on the fritz. The thermometer read 55 degrees, too warm to keep vegetables for very long. I suspect that the problem originated with last week’s one-two punch: a heat wave followed by a power outage. Ready to tackle the problem, I put on my amateur plumber’s cap and coveralls. My spare parts box contained the previous year’s broken part – a motor contactor – but not a spare replacement (as it would have if I were a professional), so I headed off to my HVAC distributor in Bennington, a 90-minute round trip (where this time I bought two). But it turns out that the contactor wasn’t the broken part after all! And so, I called Gene, who, along with his dad before him, has taken care of our cooler ever since we bought the thing. But I was only able to leave a message, and I am sitting near the phone as I write. He’ll call; he’s very dependable. In the meantime: a precaution you might take at home is to bathe your greens in very cold tap water before putting them into the crisper drawer of your refrigerator.
Have a great week, Ted
P.S. It turns out that Gene did call. He spent all of 10 minutes here and the cooler is now working fine.
Central Brooklyn CSA 