So Long Farm Share Friends + Some News

Farm Share Friends, hello!

I cannot believe we are at this point in the year: saying goodbye after another farm share season, one marked, as always, with mounds of tender greens, bouquets of the most fragrant basil, bushels of sweet scallions, and seas of juicy tomatoes.

As I peeled the last of the farm share sweet potatoes last Wednesday for a favorite Thanksgiving dish, I found myself feeling a deep appreciation for the farmers and their ability to consistently provide us with such bounty week after week, year after year. (This year, I think my own tomato plants produced five average tomatoes. Total.)

Today we say goodbye for the season and, well, goodbye forever… sorry for the drama! Some of you have followed all of this farm share chronicling for three years (two here on Substack and previously on my blog), and I’m so grateful for all of your helpful notes, recipe suggestions, and questions along the way. Thank you for reading and for your genuine interest in strategizing to make the most of a weekly share of vegetables, a subject that has been near and dear to my heart for nearly 20 years.

Every year I belong to a farm share, I learn something new, and while that alone might be reason enough to keep this newsletter going, I’m not sure I have another season’s worth of insights about prepping, planning, and preserving (The 3 Tenets of Successful Farm Sharing) to keep this weekly newsletter interesting for all of you.

But, this newsletter isn’t going anywhere, and you, of course, can reference any of the posts from the archives from now until forever. Also, if you want to still hang out, good news: we can!

As most of you know, I wrote another book, Pizza Night, which is currently available for pre-order. In sum, Pizza Night​ includes 52 pizza and 52 salad recipes, one combination for every week of the year, as well as five simple desserts. It's organized seasonally and includes recipes for the home oven, outdoor oven, the grill, Sicilian-style, Detroit-style, grandma-style, skillet pizzas, and more.

I learned so much working on this project — about the relationship between dough hydration and oven temperature, about why your dough performs better after it spends a few days in the fridge, about the benefits of parbaking pan pizzas — and I can't wait to share it all with you… in April!

In the meantime, I’m starting a pizza substack 🍕🍕🍕 It’s called Pizza Every Friday, and the first newsletter will drop — you guessed it — this Friday 🎉🎉.

In this first newsletter, I’m sharing a video I made recently with my friend Christy Alia, a great baker and cook, and an ambassador for Ooni, the company that makes portable outdoor pizza ovens. In the video, we cook 4 pizzas from Pizza Night (including the above-pictured Brussels Sprouts pizza) in Christy’s favorite Ooni oven, and along the way, Christy shares her tips and tricks for cooking pizza in these types of ovens.

I have a Gozney Dome, and I found Christy’s tips so helpful, and while I don’t really need another pizza oven, I am so tempted to buy this particular Ooni for a number of reasons, namely its portability.

Friends, I’m so excited about this, and I hope you’ll follow along:

And if you have any pizza-related topics you’d like covered, please leave a comment below. Thank you Farm Share Friends for a wonderful few years 🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽🥕