Friends! The Farm Share Newsletter is Back 🍅🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽

Plus: Cookbooks, Composting & A Few Requests

Farm Share Friends:

Hello! And how are you? It’s been too long.

After a long winter and spring hibernation, The Farm Share Newsletter is back. I am giddy with excitement to pick up my first share of the season next Tuesday, at which point regular weekly programming will resume.

If you’re new here, this is what you can expect in each newsletter:

• Tips and tricks for maximizing the week’s share, such as How to Revive Greens or How to Quick Pickle Anything.

• Recipes relevant to the vegetables in each week’s share.

• Very rough week-long meal plans (as in sketched-on-a-sheet-of-paper meal plans) to help strategize which vegetables to use first and which to use last.

If you need a little review, these two posts sum up the goals and purpose of this newsletter:

• 3 Tenets of Successful Farm Sharing

• What is a Farm Share and Why Should You Join

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What Are You Cooking Right Now?

I know for some of you, farm share season has already started up, and for others, it never stopped.

If you are already in the thick of it, please share what you are cooking. Send along links to recipes, too, if you wish.

This year, I’d love to feature more recipes from around the web rather than recycle the contents of the 24 posts from the 2022 Archives. Of course, there will be overlap from this year’s posts to last’s, but I’d still love to get as much new content in the 2023 posts as possible.

Pictured above is a recipe I made from Hetty McKinnon’s latest book Tenderheart, which I paired with another recipe from Susan Spungen’s latest book Veg Forward, both of which I will share soon! Can’t wait.

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Vegetable-Focused Cookbooks

Last year I shared a few vegetable-focused cookbooks I refer to often throughout farm share season and beyond. Many of you suggested others. I’ve compiled a more comprehensive list here. What have I missed?

• ​Chez Panisse Vegetables by Alice Waters

• ​Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden

• The Weekday Vegetarians by Jenny Rosenstrach

• ​Ruffage by Abra Berens

• ​Canal House Cooks Every Day by Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hersheimer

• ​The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

• The Glorious Vegetables of Italy by Domenica Marchetti

• Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

• Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi

• The Vegan Week by Gena Hamshaw

• Vegetable Kingdom by Bryant Terry

• Start Simple by Lukas Volger

• The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook by Amelia Saltsman

• The New Green Market Cookbook

• The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market Cookboook

• Vegetables from an Italian Garden: Season-by-Season Recipes

  ** Two New Ones **

• Tenderheart by Hetty Lui McKinnon

• Veg Forward by Susan Spungen

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Composting

In a recent article, “‘Compost Happens’ and Other Common-Sense Advice From Experts,” Margaret Roach, of the gardening website A Way to Garden, writes:

“We backyard composters can go a little easier on ourselves and still have great results, producing soil-improving bounty from our organic waste. The main mantra: Just do it.”

I loved reading this because although I have composted on and off for years, I always feel I am doing it wrong. This article made me feel fine about tossing in ALL the lemon rinds, coffee grounds, and avocado pits my heart desires.

One thing that has helped me compost more consistently is buying compostable bags for my countertop compost bin, which prevent the bin from getting dirty and stinky, and which make the overall experience of transferring the kitchen waste out to the backyard compost tumbler more enjoyable.

If you have any tips on composting, please share. I’ve had the below tumbler for years, and while I love it, I almost feel I need two. If any of you have a system you love, I’d love to know more.

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Farm Share Friends: I can’t believe we’re back! See you next week 🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽🥕🍅