Freshtables at the Market!

Bill's wall o' beets

Hello!

We hope you are as excited as we are about this week’s veggie harvest! Finally … and I mean finally … the plants are happy and GROWING! We should have lots of great “freshtables” for you on Saturday. (“Freshtables” is a hybrid word invented by our 2-year-old buddy Mallory, who cleverly combined “fresh” and “vegetable.” Last year, our little Ben came up with “hu-mazing” to describe something that was both huge and amazing – a particularly large Walla Walle onion that he harvested. Future marketing executives, perhaps?)

Yes, this week will bring lots of new vegetables and in greater quantities. Salad mix, spinach, green onions, green garlic, radishes and beets will be joined by more head lettuces, kale, collard greens, arugula, parsley, and ruby streaks. Be sure to come out and grab some of your favorites. And maybe this is the year that you try something new! Have you yet decided that your diet needs to include fresh parsley? It’s amazing to us how little parsley we can sell. It is such a treasure! The flavor of freshly harvested parsley is just so … fresh! It’s like eating a little piece of the farmers market. I swear that the fresh green flavor of parsley will conjure up your Saturday morning in the crisp morning air downtown Bloomington, coffee and scone in hand, dog on a leash, you get the idea. And all you have to do is mince it onto just about anything. No cooking required.

I have a new favorite recipe website. It’s www.culinate.com. The website describes itself as providing simple, straightforward recipes using fresh, seasonal ingredients. They also believe “that eating well and living well are interconnected, and that the intentional act of preparing food with, and for, other people leads to both.” What’s not to like about that? They also have featured recipes. If this is any indication of how cool the site is, local food guru Deborah Madison posts a recipe and her commentary once a month!

And darn it if I haven’t forgotten another awesome recipe website recommended by customer Melissa Johnson. Melissa – you’ll have to email it to me. I can’t be trusted at the market to remember anything.

But back to www.culinate.com. Let’s see if it can’t get you pumped about kale and collards. And I’m not just saying this to get you to buy it – it’s really perfect right now! Early in the season, both kale and collards are particularly well-balanced in flavor and texture. Every year we tell you how we prepare our greens – sauté with garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and olive oil. But it’s just not that compelling. So go to culinate.com and read about Garlic Braised Kale for a tasty idea (http://www.culinate.com/search/q,ctype=recipe,q=kale,stype=/218157). You can swap out the bulb garlic for our green garlic, and you’re set. For collards (which are Ben’s FAVORITE green), try the same recipe and use collards rather than kale. Seriously – this stuff is tasty! And forget whatever you’ve previously been told about cooking kale and collards for hours to make them tender. Bill’s greens are tender already.

After all of the angst about how much rain we had been getting, you’d be surprised at how happy we were to get the most recent downpour. It’s perfect for germinating our most recent planting of seeds, including melons, winter squash, summer squash, beets, carrots, and basil. It also invigorated our early greens so the spinach and lettuce are perking right up. Potatoes are looking great due to our extreme potato maintenance regime – you can’t imagine how many thousand Colorado potato beetles that Bill, our little boys, and the interns have hand-picked and squished (technical term) in the past couple of weeks. It is seriously disgusting and makes me very happy to be in my office typing up Council Reports while they’re doing it.


The interns taking care of spinach

I’m not going to be at the market on Saturday – I have a wedding in Kansas City to attend. I’m so excited! It’s just great to get together with the extended family so that my kids can get to know my cousins’ kids. (We were a close family growing up.) We’ll be whooping it up at the Fairfield Inn while Bill enjoys the solitude of a kid- and Mercy-free house for the weekend. He enjoys the occasional quiet time to recharge his introvert batteries. (Do you ever wonder how on earth we ended up together? Chatty Cathy meets The Quiet Man.) So be sure to chat it up with Bill this Saturday to make sure he doesn’t miss us too much.

For the next market, here’s what you can expect:

Head Lettuce
Spinach
Beets
Green Onions
Green Garlic
Salad Mix
Kale
Collard Greens
Arugula
Ruby Streaks
Radishes
Parsley

This week was also Bill's first CSA pickup. Several of you are members of Henry's CSA in Bloomington. Did you know that we were members of Henry's before we started our own farm? Our CSA pickup is in Eureka behind our church (Eureka Christian). It's one of the most beautiful buildings and properties in central Illinois. The space is what I envision Europe looks like -- lots of brick and big old trees. Here are a couple of pictures. The two large trees are a burr oak and a chinquapin oak, the latter of which is pretty unusual in town.





Finally, some "boy notes" for those who like to hear about Ben and Noah. Ben "graduated" from preschool this past week. Is he not just the cutest little scholar that you've ever seen?



And the boys have been little harvesting machines this year. When they're not knee deep in the strawberry patch, they have been checking out the mushroom logs. They found some really big ones last week and were so proud.



If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call us at 309-467-9228. You can also email us at blueschoolhouse@yahoo.com, although during the farm season we can’t guarantee that we’ll be checking the email as often as usual.
Best,
Mercy