Tomato Day: Washing the tomatoes

The weather is keeping us guessing these days.  It was cool and windy over the weekend, but it’s supposed to get warm again this week.  Out at the Community Farm on Saturday, Farmer Anne was watching as the wind knocked over the tall, heavy sunflowers one at a time.  She was also anticipating a cold night that might nip the basil and other tender plants.  She said that they would bounce back, but they wouldn’t be quite the way they were before.  On the other hand, the cool weather should be enough to sweeten the kale and encourage the fall crops.  So it goes at the Farm: as the seasons turn, some crops come to an end, and others step forward.  I hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming fall veggie treats, including Asian greens, winter squash, root crops and more.

Tomato Day: Cooking the tomatoes

In the kitchen we’ve had a busy week.  We’re beginning to feel like squirrels, putting things away for the winter.  The height of this was last Thursday, “Tomato Day”.  We bought the tomatoes for our winter shares from Tantre Farm and Goetz farm.  We put away around 350 qts of tomatoes, and we’re less than halfway done with what we need to put away.  It was a busy, busy morning, with every burner on the stove running full blast and every pot and sink and bowl full of tomatoes at some stage of being processed.  We had a mini crisis over the ice we needed to cool the tomatoes–campus on Thursday of welcome

Purple green beans!

week is not the place to try to find ice!  Michelle ended up making 5 stops before she found any!  Finally we had finished the tomatoes and packed them into the car to go to the freezer.  We’ll repeat the process this Thursday!

In the mean time, we have loads of delicious, seasonal treats in store for this week.  Read more after the jump!

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Eggplant Parm!

Today was a tough one out at the farm–for once the mosquitoes weren’t too bad, but instead it was hot hot hot.  We tried to work quickly to get the sensitive greens in out of the sun before they got wilty, but no one was trying to keep the workers from getting wilty.  I’m personally hoping that we get the big storm they’re predicting for tonight–we could do with some relief from this heat.  Also, we definitely need rain out at the farm.  Some crops are flourishing with the irrigation, but not everything is being watered, and rain is much better than irrigation for crops.

While I was busy with the harvest at the farm, Michelle and Peter

Fruit Salad (and Melanie)

were picking up something like 14 bushels of tomatoes from Goetz Farm and Tantre Farm at the Farmer’s Market.  Tomorrow we’re going to have a busy day processing these tomatoes and preserving them for our winter season.  I’m excited to get this big job taken care of, and it’s fun sometimes to have a BIG project and a BIG team to get it done.  I expect we’ll put on some tunes and get out our knives and work through it.  Watch out for stories from Tomato Day in future blog posts.

Speaking of stories from the kitchen, last Friday we had a special celebration.

Carrot Cake!

It was Jordan’s birthday, so Michelle ordered a catered lunch from Pilar’s Tamales and Veronica baked a spectacular carrot cake.  The whole kitchen team took a little time off from cooking to celebrate with special guests, kitchen alumni Kevin and Cynthia, as well as Jordan, of course.  It was great to have a moment together with the kitchen team.  See additional pictures in Tuesday’s blog post.

So, without further ado (because I see the storm is coming and I’ve got to get the laundry off the line), let me unveil this week’s farm share and menu after the jump.

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Ryan and Bridgette working on the corn cakes last week

The cooler weather we had at the end of last week was a nice hint of things to come.  Even though it’s still August, we’re beginning to see that fall is on the way.  Out at the Farm we’re still getting lots of classic “summer” vegetables, and we’ll probably keep getting them for another month, but we’re also seeing the first of the fall crops: spaghetti squash and napa cabbage thinnings are part of this week’s bounty.

Here at Harvest Kitchen we’re beginning to think towards our winter season.  On Thursday we’ll have our first Tomato Day, where we’ll be processing a few hundred pounds of tomatoes to get them ready to freeze for the winter.  It should be a fun, hard-working day, and I’ve been busy trying to line up supplies of tomatoes, containers, boxes, and (of course) the staff we need for this big job.

HK crew and guests taking a break to celebrate Jordan's birthday with Pilar's Tamales!

At Community Farm, I hear that several Kitchen members have made their way out to do their volunteer hours.  We have to thank Lisa and her son Robin for picking tomatoes for this week’s share.  It’s always great to have help and new energy from volunteers on harvest days–I encourage all of you to head out to the farm and get involved.

The earth is still bringing forth incredible bounty as we all begin to think about back to school. This week’s share details and menu come after the jump.

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Captain Michelle at the tiller!

It’s been another busy and eventful week here at Harvest Kitchen.  Last night Michelle and I went to the Ypsilanti District Library to give a talk about the local food movement, and, of course, Harvest Kitchen.  We had a fun discussion about what’s important to us and why we do what we do.  We had a small but dedicated audience and the conversation was very interesting.  On a more playful note, Michelle and I went out sailing earlier this week–we jokingly called it a corporate retreat, but that’s too grand a name.  We (together with Michelle’s partner Jordan and my dad) took our boat to Kent lake for a day of sailing and picnicking.  It was fun to do something not work-related for once, and we had a great day for sailing.

Rebecca thinning the turnips

Out at the farm, things are rolling along too.  The harvest continues to roll in with lots of summer-y bounty.  We had a great time on Wednesday harvesting beans and arugula–new crops this week.  The beans were so abundant–they seemed to be simply leaping off the bushes into our buckets, all purple and green.  Once again we were saved in the early morning by having mosquito headnets.  However, as the day progressed and the sun came out and the wind picked up the mosquitoes dispersed and we were able to finish the harvest and turnip-thinning without the headnets, thank goodness.  There was a lot of excitement at the farm this Wednesday because some of the farm children (kids of members and their friends) had made a lot of beautiful craft projects and were selling them at an adorable mini-Art Fair.  This led to lots of kids running around the barnyard, making pick up time a little more chaotic than usual.

In a final installment of Farm News, Peter (who works on Saturdays) asked

Perfect Farm weather

me to give a shout out to Harvest Kitchen member David who turned out on Saturday to do his volunteer hours and got to help bring in potatoes in the rain.  It sounds like David worked hard and a beautiful bounty of potatoes came rolling in. Hooray for members helping out at the Farm! Thank you, David.

Menu and share details after the jump…

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Tomatoes ready to be stuffed (before)

I spent the weekend out at HollerFest, the music festival hosted by our friends out at Frog Holler Farm.  Kitchen crew-members Becky, Ed, Jake, and Peter were there too, and we had a great time.  The music was beautiful, the setting was perfect, the food was tasty–on the whole, a delightful weekend.  It was fun to hear so much music: I got to see and hear bands I’ve loved for a long time, as well as discover new favorites.  It seems like I spent all my money buying cds to bring some of our new favorites back to the kitchen.  Particularly appropriate this week is Joe Reilly’s tomato song, all about a conversation he had with a tomato in his soup!  We had a lot of fun at the festival despite the rain on Saturday–which was much-needed by the crops, actually, so we couldn’t be too sad that it rained.  Besides the rain kept the mosquitoes away!

We continue to be flooded with the bounty of summer–this week continues the bumper crop of tomatoes we’ve been

Full of stuffing (a work in progress)

getting.  I’m excited to continue to use this abundance in the kitchen.  One thing to pay attention to is how juicy and wet these vegetables are–they have great flavor but many of our dishes (including tomato sauce, ratatoille, lasagna, and pizza sauce…) come out a little soupier than their conventional counterparts. It’s nothing to worry about, just another delightful factor that comes into play when we’re using REAL vegetables!

Menu and share details after the jump.

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Michelle extracting honey

Michelle and her honey team of family, friends, and neighbors spent all Monday extracting honey from her bee hives.  This is a huge project–it took all day and in the end they got over 250 lbs!  Michelle tells me that tasting the honey from different parts of the hive they tasted many different flavors, reflecting the different flowers that the bees were taking nectar from at different times of the year.  Amazing!  Check out her beautiful pictures.

Beautiful Bees!

Out at the Farm, all is well.  The mosquitoes are still fairly fierce, but the harvesters have learned how to avoid them by using head nets.  There’s nothing nicer than seeing a whole cloud of mosquitoes on the *outside* of your head net, knowing they can’t bite you!  We had a good morning harvesting armloads of basil and hundreds of pounds of tomatoes.  Tomato picking is a big job that requires lots of boxes and garden carts to bring the tomatoes from the field to the barnyard.  This bounty challenged the harvest crew when it came time to squeeze it into the car!  At lunchtime the workers shared surplus watermelon and cantaloupe, as well as tomatoes that had been damaged but were still tasty.

As usual, details on this week’s harvest and menu are after the jump…!

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Michelle did our pick up at the Farm on Saturday and her comment is “We’re definitely at peak season!”  Vegetables are rolling in on all sides and we even got 10 lbs of tomatoes per share–twice what we got last week!  This feels like the peak, but actually, previous years’ experience tells us that this is just the “new normal” — we’ll be rejoicing in this bounty for essentially the rest of the season, if you can believe it.  When I was at the Farm last Wednesday we were needing some rain to sustain the chard and other leafy vegetables.  It started raining just as we were leaving, so we can hope that the farm got the rain it needed!

Griddle-master Matt hard at work on the zucchini fritters

In the Kitchen, our ambitious menus bring out the best in our hard-working crew.  I finally remembered to take some pictures of the action so you can see what we were doing to bring you last week’s treats. This week we’re planning a stuffed-vegetable theme.  We’ve been getting beautiful green peppers for weeks, but this is our big chance to show them off in a Moosewood favorite, Stuffed Peppers Mexicana.  More (and more and more) after the jump.

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Potato Salad with Vinaigrette

They’ve been sneaking in, little by little for the past few weeks, but they’re really here now.  The Main Crop tomatoes, that is.  Today we got 10 lbs per share, which represents a truly epic harvest–and it’s just the beginning.  If all goes well with weather, we should continue to be flooded with tomatoes for many weeks to come.  Your harvest team braved humidity and heat, to say nothing of flocks–crowds–herds–of mosquitoes this morning to bring in this bounty.

At Community Farm we grow lots of flavorful heirloom varieties–they’re not always “normal” looking, but they often have other amazing qualities.  My co-worker loves the large yellow ones which are juicy and delicious but not as acidic as the red ones.  I always enjoy finding good Brandywine tomatoes, which are large and grow in gnarly shapes, but they have the most flavor of anything–since they’re so big they often have splits and bad spots on them, so it’s always a delight to find whole ones.

Today’s storm didn’t hit until I was just about home from the farm, but I hope that it rained there as much as it did here

Chard in the sunlight - always a lovely sight

in Ann Arbor.  Believe it or not, after all that rain we got in July, we need it to rain again!  So, everyone, cross your fingers and hope for a good soaking rain to keep these crops rolling in throughout August.  We have some drip irrigation on some crops (the broccoli for the fall is thriving with a bit of irrigation), but rain is better.

So, enough talking, on to the share and menu! (after the jump)

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I think I really love August.  It’s truly high summer and the harvest is abundant and it seems like these long, hot days

Happy Harvest Crew!

will never end.  I am beginning to think about the cool days of fall and winter, but it really feels far-off, like a dream.  Last week was a good one out at the farm.  On Thursday we had a good team and got a lot of weeding done, rescuing the kale and Brussels sprouts from an overpowering crop of weeds.  We were weeding in one of our toughest fields, Heron, but all the rain we’ve had made the ground soft and the weeding went easily, accompanied by conversation ranging from local gossip to philosophy and politics! In the kitchen things have been busy too. All these veggies require a lot of washing and chopping, especially the bountiful, beautiful root vegetables.  Michelle got to visit the

Kris and her son and the 2nd place dairy cow

Saline County Fair to pick up some of our meat from Kris, and while there she got to see Kris’s son take second prize with his dairy cow (see picture).  So, on the whole, a busy and productive week on our end.  Sorry I’ve been so lackadaisical about taking photos–more photos coming soon!

This week’s harvest includes some favorite tastes of summer which we can’t improve on–melons and sweet corn, so look for those items to be sent home fresh and ready for enjoyment. More after the jump.

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Beet, Carrot, and Cuke salad from last week's share

Hello again everyone!

Here we are at week 9 already! It’s hard to believe.  It was a good morning at the Farm today, but all of us harvesters were extremely sleepy because we’d been out late attending our dear co-worker Aaron Gold’s farewell concert.  Aaron has been an amazing presence on the farm since last fall, and we’re sad to be losing him, but the attractions of the west coast beckon, and Aaron is off on a journey.  Since he’s a musician, Aaron’s final gift to his friends here in Ann Arbor was a beautiful concert featuring 16 of his closest musician friends.  Naturally, this event ran quite late, and we were a little bleary-eyed at the farm this morning.

Farewell, Aaron!

However, it was worth it to see a concert featuring Aaron playing everything from the didgeridoo to the jaw harp to the mason jars (really!).  Despite our late night we managed to bring in quite a bounty of vegetables (while Aaron took a nap in the hammock–there are pictures, but I won’t post them here).

In the kitchen on Tuesday we had one of those events that will go down in memory as a classic Harvest Kitchen experience:  one of our members, Howie, came in to teach the team (and my dad) how to chop up a raw chicken.  We usually get our chickens chopped by the butcher, but sometimes it doesn’t work out and we have to deal with whole birds.  Thanks to Howie, this is no longer a daunting or scary thing!  Sadly I have no pictures of this fun and business-like lesson because my hands were busy while it was happening, so you’ll have to imagine the scene of us gathered around the steel table with knives in hand.  This is so classic of Harvest Kitchen–we get incredible help from members, workers, and volunteers all the time, and we wouldn’t be the same without all of you!

So, we aren’t doing chickens this week, but we’ve got a great menu planned.  Read all about it after the jump.

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