Hi friends of Mano Farm…just wanted to let you know about this amazing organization and their mostly-open-source information library that has been invaluable to us. The SARE – Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education website is an absolute wealth of information for gardeners and organic farmers. Pass it on…

Hey CSA members,

Apologies for the belated mid-week newsletter. We harvested fava beans for your shares this past week and I meant to say something about them. I was pretty excited about them personally because we were only intending to grow favas for our seed company and as a winter cover crop (it’s an excellent nitrogen fixer), but on a lark I decided to save a bed and see how the beans did. When we went picking them I was really happy about the yields. Anyway, on to cooking them… One of our CSA members Ben makes a fava bean bruschetta by shelling the beans and blending them up, with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, to taste. That’s a simple way to start. Martha Rose Schulman, one of my all-time favorite recipe authors (I admit I sometimes rely on her sometimes too heavily, and I am actively trying to diversify my recipe pool), has published a great Moroccan Fava Bean and Vegetable Soup recipe.

We’re going to be putting a lot of green garlic (garlic that is harvested immature, before the inedible papery husks have formed) in the shares these coming week, and the New York Times has been going to town with green garlic recipes. This list is not exhaustive, but here are a few ideas:

• “When Garlic Goes Green” (an introduction to the crop)
• “Turning up the Heat on Lettuce and Green Garlic Soup” (this one was recommended by our CSA member J.B. White; nice find JB, it’s a double CSA item recipe).
• “Soba With Green Garlic, Spinach, Edamame and Crispy Tofu” (sorry we don’t have spinach, but maybe try it with chard?)

On the technology front, I’ve also been doing a little bit of tweaking to our newsletter system. From now on ya’ll are going to receive a weekly mailing that includes a Mano Farm masthead and aggregates the postings on our web site. This mailing will also include installments of this newsletter when we write them. We’ve also created a seed catalog and newsletter request form that is specific to our seed company. Also, if you don’t want to have anything to do with these mailings, there will be an option to automatically unsubscribe to them at the bottom of each email.

This coming Sunday, in addition to the aforementioned favas, we’ve got carrots, chard, broccoli, chicory, a culinary herb medley, probably a few bunches of radishes (perhaps for the trade bakset?)

Hope ya’ll are dodging the heat… if it’s any consolation, it’ll be much cooler on the weekend whereas it looks worse in the Midwest and east.

From the farm,

Quin

Dear CSA members,

The fennel bulb on the table this last week and present one is a variety called “Perfection,” which we have grown from our own seed on the farm (and if anyone is interested in growing this at home, we also offer this in our seed catalog). I meant to write about this last week, but things have been so busy here that the task just slipped away.

I like fennel because when the foliage is trimmed away (you should definitely do this for storing the vegetable) the remaining bulb looks like some kind of artery. Plus the cool, crisp texture and licorice flavor is a perfect field snack.

The bulb can be used either raw or cooked. In our farmer meals we often sauté finely sliced portions of the cheeks (just take off any outer layer of the bulb and that’s what I call a cheek) with onions prior to adding vegetables. Raw, it’s a nice addition to the base of a salad dressing.

The foliage can also be used: small portions can be finely minced into salads or added to a stir-fry, or alternatively, the foliage can be dried and used as a seasoning or for teas. Fennel is a strong digestive aid – the seeds, bulb and foliage all have similar effects.

Sometimes there’s a small portion of bolt in the center of the bulb, which is a fibrous woody stalk when the plant goes to seed. Watch out for this, as this experience of fennel will undoubtedly leave you gnawing on some fibrous flowering stalk wondering why everyone likes fennel so much.

Here’s a recipe for oven-roasted fennel that I have yet to try. However, I will note that I have unsuccessfully roasted fennel in the past, finding it too dense of a food to be broken down by the heat of the oven alone. So I’ve had an idea to par-boil a quartered bulb for 5-10 minutes prior to roasting in the oven.

We’ve got broccoli back in the CSA shares this week, which I suspect many folks will be happy about. There’s a bit of bitterness in the CSA share too – red-veined chicory greens. Use sparingly raw or cooked, and the bitter is something your taste palette (if it hasn’t already) will acclimate to.

This will likely be the last week of artichokes. Carrots and parsnips are on deck.

-Quin

P.S. This is again, a week late, but my Mom mentioned that last week’s episode of KCRW’s “Good Food,” discussed people foraging for wild fennel.