Friends! The Farm Share Newsletter is Back 🍅🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽
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:
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.
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
Ruffage by Abra Berens
Canal House Cooks Every Day by Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hersheimer
The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi
Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi
The Vegan Week by Gena Hamshaw
Vegetable Kingdom by Bryant Terry
The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook by Amelia Saltsman
Vegetables from an Italian Garden: Season-by-Season Recipes
** Two New Ones **
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.
Farm Share Friends: I can’t believe we’re back! See you next week 🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽🥕🍅
I used the compostable bags for a few years but didn’t like finding bits of them in my sort-of finished compost, and they seemed like an unnecessary expense. I started putting a handful of wood chips in the bottom of my kitchen compost container and that has worked wonderfully. Not only do I get ‘dry’ ingredients in the outside compost pile/heap, but the chips soak up moisture from coffee grounds and other wet materials. They also keep the bottom of the kitchen compost container cleaner; the stuff dumps out easier and leaves less sticking to the base. After dumping, I add a handful of wood chips and start afresh. I’ve been doing this for probably two years now and it’s working very well all around.
Funny timing...dinner tonight is your fresh corn polenta with garlic slow roasted tomatoes and garden basil and a loaf of fresh sourdough bread that I just pulled from the oven.