They are delicious right off the tree. We'll be making jam and other goodies with them.
This was a yummy preparation of cherry tomatoes that we marinated in balsamic vinegar and put on toasted ciabatta rubbed with garlic, topped with ricotta and sprinkled with basil. We got the recipe from a really pretty cookbook A Platter of Figs.
And the carrot harvest is on. We are still trying to figure out why the carrots aren't bigger. It could be that the soil is too dense and the carrot can't push down.
Our lima beans are ready for picking!
Tonight we ate a local fresh dinner with homemade spaghetti sauce. Onions from the farmers market, pasta from Caputo's, and Brooklyn Farm tomatoes, garlic and basil. The only major carbon footprint comes from the 4000 miles the parmesan travelled. Tough to avoid.
Hello! Farmer-for-a-day guest blogging here!
There’s nothing better than getting fresh produce from Brooklyn Farm. It’s a combination of all my favorite things – food, free stuff, and usually a trip to see Farmers 1 & 2. Once upon a time, I had a green thumb, but my choice of borough and the airshaft that casts a permanent night (and pigeon habitat) on my windows has left me without a garden.
Farmer No. 2 met me at an undisclosed Manhattan location to deliver to me fourteen tomatoes, two jalapeños, and a beautiful bunch of red chard.
I have never eaten chard. In fact, until this incident, it scared me. Sometimes vegetable names scare me, like scapes. (I have heard that scapes are like garlic, but frankly, I do not eat scapes because it sounds like scabies or scabs or scabbies.) However, as a guest blogger I had a duty to cook and eat the chard.
Today could not be another ice-cream-cake-for-lunch-Tuesday.
Meanwhile, I found a recipe in the New York Times. I roughly followed the directions and boiled the chard for about a minute in heavily salted water, immersed it into a large bowl of ice water to stop the cooking.
As it cooled, I heated olive oil in my pretty blue pot, roasted pine nuts and sautéed minced garlic. The recipe said to sauté the stalks for 3-5 minutes before adding the leaves, but given that the Brooklyn Farm produces tender baby chard-lets, and not the tough stalks on grocery store chard, I didn’t feel bad about disregarding this step.
The pièce de résistance of the dish was the golden raisins and cranberries that I soaked in hot water for about 10 minutes. I added these reconstituted fruits and the ½ cup of soaking water into the pot with the chard, pine nuts, garlic. I added a little salt and pepper and was ready to eat!
It looked like Christmas in a blue pot! Red, green, and Christmas light-shaped pine nuts. Would it taste like Christmas, too?
First bite analysis: It tasted like stir-fried lettuce boiled in beet juice. But as the flavors melded together, it got much, much better. I added more salt and pepper and experimented with a sprinkle of nutmeg. The bites with the golden raisins were divine, and the moment I got some of the browner, crispy pine nuts in the bite, I was a chard convert.
Recommendations for next chard preparation: more pine nuts, fried longer until golden, and more golden raisins. I’d also add bacon at the beginning.
Everything’s better with bacon.
Baby Habañeros. These little ones are going to be HOT!
Baby eggplant.
And baby cucumber. This one is going through some ugly growing pains right now.
