What I'm Making with my Texas CSA Veggies: Kale & Beet Salad

I've been a @JBGorganic CSA member (CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, ie. local farm membership) for five whole weeks now, and the novelty of fresh, regionally-grown, organic vegetables delivered to me weekly has not worn off. Especially since it is my first winter in the south and I love having fresh food all year round! I have a few vegetables in my own garden, but not enough variety or volume to sustain my eating habits. The CSA has been perfect.

JBG (www.jbgorganic.com) has provided a different mix of veggies each week, including: kale, lettuce, spinach, rutabagas, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, broccoli, radishes, and more. The carrots in particular have been amazing--we taste-tested them with store carrots and the difference was significant.

My favorite recipe last week was stuffed chard leaves with a cream cheese, carrot, rice, and red lentil filling. This week I made a kale & beet salad that my mother and I have revised over time. The original recipe came from The Flying Apron Cookbook by Jennifer Katzinger and Lorene Edwards Forkner.

The original recipe calls for currants and pecans. I like those, but I almost always have slivered almonds and raisins in the house and I rarely have currants around... so I made some substitutions. I also cut down on the oil since doing so lowers the fat content without much change in taste. This is by far my favorite way to use kale raw, which isn't a common thing to do--so many people find raw kale bitter. It certainly does not taste bitter in this recipe.

 


Here's my modified recipe:

Kale and Beet Salad

3 Tbsp water

2 Tbsp real maple syrup

3 medium beets (about 1 pound) peeled halved and julienned

2 bunches kale (or chard) chopped into bite sized pieces

1/3 cup raisins

½ cup slivered almonds

Dressing

1/3 cup balsamic vinegar

2 Tbsp olive oil

½ tsp lemon juice

¼ teaspoon  Dijon mustard

2 Tbsp real maple syrup

 

Bring water and maple syrup to a boil, stir for one minute, then remove from heat. Place beets in a steamer and steam until fork tender, about 10 minutes. Strain and transfer to a large bowl. Toss beets with water/maple syrup mixture. Add kale, raisins, and nuts. Combine all dressing ingredients. Whisk and pour over the beet mixture. Toss & refrigerator. This salad tastes best cold. 

Happy eating!

Box Full of Vegetables: CSA Week 1!

I signed up for a CSA, which is a concept that seems to be a lot better recognized in Montana than in Texas. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The idea is that you buy in to a local or regional farm, and then you share in both the risk and rewards. The reward is generally food grown close to home: in-season vegetables and herbs that change each week based on what is growing well. Is there is a flood or a drought, you might get less or nothing at all (although I hear this is pretty uncommon to most CSAs). But the reward in the risk is that you may make it possible, through your finanacial support "rain or shine" for a local farm to push through a rough time then can pick back up again.

I love knowing where my food comes from, and I love when it does not have to travel hundreds (or thousands) of miles to get to me. Since I can't grow everything myself, a CSA is the best way for me.

I got the smallest share and I am signed up to get a box weekly from JBG Organic (https://www.jbgorganic.com/). I picked up the box at the Whole Foods near my house. Everything is organic and super fresh.

My week one share consisted of:

- 3 heads of red leaf lettuce
- 1 bunch of green onions
- 15-ish radishes (I think there were 15... I started eating them before I counted)
- 6 beautiful carrots
- 1 bunch chard
- 5-ish cups broccoli? They weren't whole heads so I'm not sure how much there was.
- 1 bunch of spinach

My First Winter Garden

Though I don't want to rub it in too much to my Northern friends, I am thrilled to have so much planted and growing in December. I arrived in Houston in October and everything I have planted is something that will grow through the winter months that I traditionally had to spend pining away over seed catalogs while watching snow pile up outside my window. For me, being able to garden year-round is absolutely the best thing about living in the south. Hooray for my first winter garden!

Here's what's planted, either from seed or as starts from Buchanan's:

• Snap and snow peas
• Admiral peas (for dry/soup peas)
• Fava beans
• Garlic
• Leeks
• Broccoli (two varieties)
• Cabbage (three varieties)
• Kale (two varieties)
• Radishes (two varieties)
• Carrots (three varieties)
• Beets (two varieties)
• Rainbow Chard
• Spinach
• Lettuce
• Artichokes (two varieties)

And here are some of the longer term investments that are in the ground but won't be producing over the winter:

• Strawberries
• Pineapples

Here are some photos of the plots over the past month.

I am Now a Southern Gardener

I took a very big step this fall: I moved from Helena, Montana to Houston, Texas. I have been a Northern gardener for my entire life but I am very much looking forward to gardening year-round and experimenting with plants I could never grow in Montana. I have been here for two very eventful weeks!

Week 1:

• Picked up a copy of Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening at an estate sale for $5 ($40 new/$25 on Amazon). Bargain!
• Assessed the garden spaces around the house: clay soil, lots of black mulch. It does not drain well at all... we'll have to fix that.
• Picked a couple of pounds of pecans off the ground after a big storm with a bunch of other random people on the side of the roads near Sugar Land. Apparently this is a common thing?

Week 2:

• Visited the Urban Harvest farmer's market on Richmond, bought okra & eggplant (in October!!!), joined Urban Harvest, and bought their gardening book Year Round Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers for Metro Houston: A Natural Organic Approach Using Ecology, by Bob Randall.
• Visited Wabash Feed & Garden Store and Buchanan's Native Plants Nursery. Both were very cool and I will be returning to both stores for soil amendments, plant starts, seeds, and more.

First Potato Harvest 2014

I have been pulling greens, peas, and radishes out of the garden for some time, but today I pulled out my first potatoes of the season: a few Colorado Rose and a few All-Blue. I also have French Fingerlings planted but did not find any yet and didn't want to dig too much if they aren't ready. I'm boiling the potatoes I found for an oil and vinegar salad for lunch tomorrow. They look so pretty in the pot!

I also pulled out another pound of raspberries. I'm having trouble keeping up with those and will probably have to start making jam soon. 

Natural Egg-Dying

Last night I dyed eggs with friends, and we tried our hands at making our own dyes. We used instant coffee for the deep brown, red onions for red, cabbage for blue, and turmeric for yellow/orange. The cabbage eggs had to soak overnight to get much color, but the results are beautiful!

I think they turned out pretty darn good. I will be making egg salad this weekend :)

Grad School Hiatus

While it was not my intention, I have obviously been on a bit of a blogging hiatus while I finish graduate school. If you subscribe or follow my posts, hang around. I should be back in the swing of things this summer after I graduate.

In the meantime, feel free to follow me on twitter at @MTbeekeeper. 

And So it Begins ... #zucchini

 

It's time to break out The New Zucchini Cookbook by Nancy Ralston and Marynor Jordan. I snagged this book at a library discard sale years ago, and I use it every year when the summer squash start to outnumber me 5 to 1. It is one of the only vegetable-specific cook books I own, and it gets used enough that I am okay with its very specific focus.