Author: Abby

I was having a conversation with Mike yesterday about a CSA customer last year who, towards the end of the season, insisted we keep her Kale.  Too much! – she said.  I can’t eat any more greens!

I find this slightly comical, and I do not mean to disrespect any of our CSA customers (or otherwise) who hate the taste of swiss chard and kale.  When my parents started introducing us to dark leafy greens circa 2003, I thought they were slightly nuts and could barely scoff down two bites of the stuff.

Looking back, I refer to those years as the dark years – before I discovered the incredibly versatile and delicious nature of dark greens, before I knew that their nutrient profile was like nature’s multivitamin, and before I realized that they were the perfect complement to my morning eggs.

In light of this, I’ve decided to start a new series to give all you leafy-green nay-sayers some nutritional inspiration in the morning to easily incorporate your dark leafy greens.  I’ll typically go through one bunch of kale/swiss chard in a morning, and then have more later in the day if I’m feeling wild.  Some caution should be taken:

1.  I eat a ridiculous amount of food, and thus what is ample for me is probably going to surpass the content capacity of your stomach 3 fold (ask Mike, I could eat him under the table any day).

2.  I also bike roughly 15 miles a day for transport, and spend several days a week doing heavy labor on the farm, so reiterate point 1.

3.  I try to steer away from gluten as it makes my tummy uncomfortable (will not disclose further details for your own good) so all of these breakfasts are egg-based.  I will try to mix in a fair bit of vegetarian options, but most are pretty adaptable to personal dietary preferences/restrictions.  I also am a full believer in saturated fat from good quality animal sources, so if you are not, these breakfasts will not serve as much inspiration.

4.  I am crazy.

 

So, today’s breakfast is:

Scrambeled Egg Skillet with Pan-fried potatoes, wilted arugula, and (of course) Bubba Goat Cheese (made with milk from the one and only Bubbles the Goat!)

3 small-ish potatoes, diced into 1/4 inch pieces (think red-gold size, although I used a combo of peter wilcox, adirondack reds, and yukon gems, just the smaller ones)

1 clove garlic (I prefer the milder soft neck variety we carry in the stand for quick cooking, harder neck is good for roasts)

1/4 lb arugula, cleaned and roughly chopped

3 eggs – the good kind.

salt/pepper if it’s your thing

1 tbsp good quality butter (I use kerrygold)

Goat Cheese to taste.

 

Very rough directions:

Melt butter and saute potatoes on low heat for about 15 minutes (if you’re impatient, which I usually am, you can turn up the heat and cook them less time, they just often tend to burn or cook unevenly).  The smaller the chop, the faster they cook, so if you’re in a real hurry you can shred em.  Or, sometimes when I’m feeling prepared I’ll cook a batch at the beginning of the week.  If I don’t eat them all at once, they make breakfasts super fast.  Add the garlic in about 5 minutes into potato cooking process.  Keep low heat so the garlic doesn’t burn.  Add chopped arugula once the potatoes are 99% cooked just to quickly wilt it.  Once wilted, throw in the eggs and salt.  Once eggs are evenly cooked, serve and top with fresh goat cheese.  I never mix the goat cheese in because I feel like it masks the flavor too much, and goat cheese is yum.

A picture:

 

Ugh, I just remembered I have leeks in my fridge and those would have made a phenomenal addition.  Breakfast fail.

This is what I made for one person.  You could easily divide this by 2 if you’re smaller people or eat more human-size breakfasts.  Or you could double it for the family breakfast in the morning.
Happy Sunday everyone, and happy breakfasting!

Warning: This post is long and has no pictures.  It’s probably no fun at all.

Our sweet corn has come and gone.  That’s right – within a 5 day span, we started harvesting, finished harvesting, and mowed it down.  “WHAT!?”  You may ask, “LUDICROUS!” you may rave. How, you’re wondering, did you not even get to taste it?  Well, to find out, you first have to waddle through some of my rantings.

Disclaimer: I do not have an especially positive relationship with corn.  Scratch that, I have an extremely negative relationship with corn.  In fact, I pretty much LOATHE corn.  So, read on with that in mind, and accept that I am very biased.

Continue reading “To corn, or not to corn?”

The weather of the past week has proven one thing for sure – summer is upon us!  Scorching days of 90 degree heat that seems to radiate from the ground beneath us and a humidity that makes you melt in the shade have made us all question our sanity, but the hope is that it turns our laborious efforts into a fruitful summer.  As we dredge up all our strength to wake up in the morning and attempt some sort of productivity in spite of the inhospitable climate, we are rewarded with the sight of ripening tomatoes, flowering eggplants, thirst quenching cucumbers and zucchini that seems to triple in size overnight.  Yup, there’s no doubt about it – summer has arrived!

While summer traditionally is a period marked by juicy tomatoes and sweet corn, it also means the end of some of our more delicate spring crops.  Spinach is a distant memory, lettuce browns and wilts in the hot days, and our more cool-tolerant brassicas have decided to just give up.  Most traumatic to me, however, is the passing of sugar snap peas as we pulled the remnants of the plants up this weekend in order to pave the way for summer crop planting.  It was all I could do to scavenge the last few perfectly plump peas as we piled our compost high with the plant matter.  Despite my desperation at clinging to the last few remnants of spring, I can’t say these peapods were especially tasty.  As the plants get stressed, the fruit gets tougher and significantly less sweet.  What I find most intriguing is that my tastes have started to fluctuate with seasons as well – after the first harvest I ate nearly 2 pounds in the course of a 1 hour flight, and now have to actively try to eat a handful.

Continue reading “The challenges of seasonality”

Hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Memorial Day weekend!

We spent our vacation doing what we love most…farming!  As we learned last year while we delivered CSA pickups on July 4th, farmers very rarely get holidays.  After having several days of indoor working last year in the rain (plenty to do, but just not outside!) we felt like we had to take full advantage of the beautiful weather.  On top of that, we got a surprise Friday afternoon when our sweet potato slips arrived a week early (funny enough, this exact same thing happened last year, and I have the scars to prove it from when I fell down my stairs at 5 am in the morning to go dig holes!)

ANYHOW, I digress.  Here’s what we accomplished on Belmont Acres Farm this weekend:

– 500 leeks, 400 heads of lettuce, 450 butternut squash, 300 acorn squash, 300 delicata squash, 150 watermelon, 75 zuccini, 75 yellow squash, all started in the hoophouse

– 80 Fungal resistant tomato planted in fields (hopefully fungal resistant!), staked, and mulched

– 200 parsley plants palnted

– 200 basil plants planted

– 500 sweet potato slips planted

– 50 cucumber plants planted

– 100 zuccini/summer squash planted in the field

 

So yea, we got some work done!  This doesn’t even include all the plowing, tilling, composting, and mulching that goes into preparing the beds.  We’re also underway on a cold box for the wash room.  I’m also constantly getting stressed when I don’t think everything will fit in our fields, but somehow we always seem to find space!

And in other news, we may have some new lady inhabitants at the farm this weekend.  Stay tuned for details!

 

This past Friday marked the first of what I hope will be many more educational excursions on the farm.  As those of you who were with us last year know, in addition to our passion for making the world a more delicious place, we will also use any occasion to hop up onto our nutritional soapbox and probably lecture you for longer than you may be comfortable.  Last year we made it a priority to give greens in every share because we firmly believe that everyone needs more greens in their diet.  Anyone who’s turned down one of my fliers with the excuse of “We could never eat all those vegetables!” has surely suffered the wrath of Abby’s nutrition rants.  (They can be pretty epic.  You’ve been warned).

Anyways, I digress.  Friday morning was kicked off by a visit from one of our favorite Belmont teachers, Ms. Cox, at Burbank.  Ms. Cox’s class came for their first visit in the fall to poke around and pull up some carrots, which everyone agreed were the best carrots they’ve tasted (with the exception of one, incredibly honest boy who said they had too much dirt on them).  This time around they came with a slightly different agenda.  In relation to their recent medieval unit they came as peasants to work their lord’s land.  We had Quarry workers clearing rocks from the field to build walls, farmers planting beets, trench diggers digging trenches and planting potatoes, and animal caretakers mucking out the chicken coop (we spare noone).  They also got an opportunity to greet our friendly goats, as it’s hard to be 5 years old and NOT hug a goat.  All the kids seemed to have a blast, and while I’m not sure how much they learned, they walked away with dirt on their face and smiles from ear to ear, and I call that a successful field trip.  Many of them will hopefully come back with their families to see their potatoes grow throughout the summer!

Later in the afternoon I headed over to Wellington to chat with a few classes about the chicks they recently hatched.  We discussed the differences between happy chicken eggs and unhappy chicken eggs, and hypothesized why we humans were not quite as good as mother hens at hatching chicks.  While my english public speaking skills are admittedly a bit rusty, I thought it went fabulously and look forward to going back at some point in the future.

Throughout my many (at least for a 26 year old, it’s many) years working in education, I find it to be a general rule that I walk away from any experience learning more than I’ve taught.  This past Friday was no different for me, so here are a few things I learned from our forray into kindergarden education:

1) 6 year olds are the BEST rock clearers

2) Never joke about throwing an egg on the floor in front of kids

3) Dirt and sunshine is the best medicine for anything

4) Kids will eat anything they have a hand in growing

5) Chickens are much better at hatching chicks than people are.  It’s just nature, people

I am overwhelmed at the enthusiastic response we’ve had from parents of kindergardeners and town day passersby that are already interested in the farm!  While in some respects it was disheartening that literally every person I talked to at town day at 90% of the kindergardeners I spoke with had never heard of the farm, in some respects it’s refreshing to see how much of an impact we can have with minimal effort.  And if you were at town day or a kindergardener parent and HAVEN’T been by or checked us out, please do!  We only bite when it’s harvest time.