Hello Friends!
The first farmers market is ALMOST HERE! Whoo-hoo! We are so excited. It’s our sixth season at the Bloomington Farmers Market. So hard to believe. When we started, Noah was small enough to plunk into a crate with a radish for entertainment, and Ben wasn’t even an embryo. Now they’re real boys – lots of booger humor, raucous laughter, and giant messes. Noisy but fun!
It is also our first season without our dog Pepper. She finally let go in early April – a peaceful end to a fabulous dog life. Pepper wasn’t really “our” dog. She was everybody’s dog. She had a wide territory in which she would get biscuits and gravy, belly rubs, a good brushing, and the occasional new collar. From May through October, Pepper would disappear every Friday afternoon and return on Sunday evening – she was hangin’ at the club (the Sportsman’s Club) behind our property. She was pretty much the club mascot. The club had a sign posted at the gate – “No dogs except on a leash.” They might as well have put “except Pepper” at the end. In fact, at the meeting in which the club president reiterated the leash rule, a leash-less Pepper trotted right across the front of the meeting area, probably looking for scraps.
Everyone knew her, and everyone fed her. She was also our farming Buddha. You could always look to Pepper to witness true peacefulness, especially when she was sleeping somewhere completely inappropriate like Bill’s seed trays (full of seedlings, of course!). She’ll be sorely missed.
On Monday of this week we had our second and final pre-season veggie drop off in Uptown Normal. Harvesting for Monday happened on Sunday, which was amazingly bad weather. Whoa. Gusts of wind up to 40 mph, a driving rain, and chilly. We’re glad that wasn’t our new farm hands’ first day!
The veggie drop off itself went well. Early Monday morning must be vegetable delivery day in Uptown Normal. As I handed out bags of freshly picked sorrel and green garlic to market customers, the Valley View Fresh Food truck was dropping off large boxes of lettuce (or a lettuce-like product) to a local restaurant. When I pulled into the alley behind the Garlic Press to drop off a cooler full of early season produce, I was suddenly nose-to-nose with a tractor trailer with the name “U.S. Food Service” emblazoned across the front. It was a classic matchup … the veggie-laden Toyota Corolla versus the something-like-veggie-laden semi. We revved our engines. The semi driven whipped out a box of iceberg. I held out a bag of arugula, small but mighty … OK, it didn’t really happen that way, but it was quite the daydream.
Speaking of fresh produce, here’s what we’ll have on Saturday:
Baby Beets
Sorrel
Arugula
Radish
Green Onion
Green Garlic
Red Russion Kale (very young and tender)
With the exception of baby beets, I provided details on all of the veggies above on the last blog posting. (This is why I love the blog! I hope you do too!)
Are you a beet eater? Have you ever tried really fresh beets? Now is the time to dip in a toe, so to speak. The beets are small and tasty, and the greens don’t get any better.
Right now the baby beets are about the size of marbles and have WONDERFUL beet greens on top. This time of year, the beet greens are perfect because they’ve been living the life of luxury in our hoop house. No bugs + perfectly controlled water = awesome beets.
If you’re not cooking with both the beets and the greens together, you should cut them apart and store them separately in Ziploc bags. The beets themselves can last for months in the fridge. The greens only a few days. Beet greens can be cooked JUST LIKE swiss chard, although the beet green stalks are not nearly as big.
Raw Beet Salad (Elizabeth Schneider)
Prepare a dressing of balsamic vinegar, pepper, salt, olive oil, paper-thin shallot slices, and cumin seds. Tose with finely grated raw beets (or thin slices of baby beets). Let stand 15 minutes or more. Serve on a bed of lightly dressed lettuce.
Beet Risotto with Greens (Deborah Madison)
5 ½ to 6 ½ cups vegetable (or chicken) stock, including beet or chard stems
3 tablespoons butter or a mixture of butter and olive oil
½ cup finely diced onion
1 ½ cups Arborio rice
½ cup dry white wine
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 tablespoons chopped basil (1 tablespoon dried)
2 to 3 medium beets, peeled and grated (about 2 cups)
2 to 3 cups greens (beet, chard, kale, or spinach) – stems removed, chopped
salt and freshly milled pepper
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon, use to taste
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Have the stock simmering on the stove. Heat the butter in a wide pot, add the onion, and cook over medium heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the rice, stir to coat it well, and cook for 1 minute. Add the wine and simmer until it’s absorbed, then stir in half the parsley, the basil, grated beets, and the chard or kale. Add 2 cups stock, cover, and cook at a lively simmer until the stock is absorbed. Begin adding the remaining stock in ½-cup increments, stirring constantly until each addition is absorbed before adding the next. When you have 1 cup left, add the beet greens or spinach. Taste for salt, season with pepper, then stir in the lemon zest and juice to taste. Served dusted with the cheese and the remaining parsley.
Beet Greens with Raisins
Chop the beet greens coarsely. Chop an onion and sauté it in olive oil. Add 2T water and ¼ cup of raisins and cook until the raisins soften. (You can chop the raisins or not.) This should take about 5 minutes. Add the beet greens, 1T olive oil, and 2T water and cook, covered, until the greens wilt (about 3 minutes). Uncover and cook a few more minutes until liquid evaporates. Add salt and pepper and eat up.
Every year I seriously crave this recipe for pickled radishes. It’s always a fun side dish at a party, too:
Quick Pickled Radishes
12 small radishes (about 2 cups)
4 T sugar
2 T salt
2 bay leaves
2 cloves crushed garlic
1 T cider vinegar
1 tsp crushed red pepper
Cut tops off radishes and score the bottom with an X about ¼-inch deep. Place all ingredients in a nonreactive bowl, cover, and shake to coat radishes. Leave covered overnight or at least 5 hours. Makes a delicious accompaniment to Asian dishes.
You can also use the radish tops in this soup from “Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini”:
Radish Top Soup
Very fresh tops from 2 large bunches of radishes
3 medium scallions (green onions)
2 medium flowery potatoes (3/4 to 1 pound)
1T oil
½ tsp sugar
3 cups vegetable broth
salt and white pepper
Nutmeg
8 to 12 radishes
Wash radish leaves. Trim scallions and then chop the white and light green parts; thin-slice the greens. Peel and thin-slice potatoes.
Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add radish greens, chopped scallion, and potatoes. Toss until leaves wilt. Add sugar and 2.5 cups broth. Simmer, covered, over low heat until potatoes are soft (20 minutes).
Puree until smooth. Return to pan and stir in remaining broth for desired consistency. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg.
Slice radishes into soup and garnish with scallions to taste.
Farm and Market News
This year we really want to make a big change – far fewer plastic bags!!! It is just tragic to consider how much plastic is literally floating around in the world. In trees, on power lines, in the ocean. Did you know there’s a clump of plastic bags and other plastic debris glommed together in the Pacific Ocean with a size twice that of Texas?? So we are transitioning to biodegradable bags this year after we run out of the non-degradable type that we’ve always bought. Of course, the biodegradables are quite a bit more expensive. What we really want to do is to encourage you to BRING YOUR OWN BAGS. The awesome thing is that this year the market is going to offer free re-usable bags for the first few weeks. I think they’ll be like the kind you get at the grocery store, which are really durable and easy to carry.
The market is also changing its hours – we’ll now open at 7:30 a.m. and end at noon. Hallelujah! 45 more minutes of sleeping on Saturday mornings means a lot to me!
There’s not much else to report about the farm right now. The strong spring winds blew over our nicest chicken coop-on-wheels. It’s pretty smashed up, but fortunately none of the chickens were flattened. And of course, we always have our back-up chicken coop, affectionately known as the "Coop-a-cabana" because it has this Prohibition-era speakeasy feel to it. I'm always tempted to hang up party lights for them.
In other news, Bill’s new electric tractor kicks butt. You can read about it in a previous blog. Bill is also renting new land for next year. The soil in that field is a rich black silt loam and it is adjacent to a babbling brook. Less wind, more scenery, and not next to a road – what more could he want?!
And tell your friends about Common Ground and the Garlic Press …
Keep in mind that Bill also sells produce at Common Ground in downtown Bloomington during the market season. We'll be staring those deliveries next week. We would've started earlier, but the spring weather has been so cool that things aren’t growing as quickly as we’d like. If you’re looking to eat Bill’s veggies already prepared, head to the Garlic Press in Uptown Normal. They do amazing things with vegetables!
We’ll see you at the Downtown Bloomington Farmers Market this Saturday from 7:30 a.m. – noon. We’ll also be at the Trailside Market in Uptown Normal, every Tuesday night from 3:30 – 6:00 p.m. starting JUNE 2.
Please pass along these emails to any friends that you may think would be interested. We plan to put out the email sign-up sheet during the market season again. Call us at 467-9228 if you have questions.
Thanks!
Mercy Davison
