Cooking With This Week's Box
Overwintered Potato Onions:
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| Smashed Potatoes with Charred Onion Chimichurri Photo from www.thesavoryanchor.com |
Asparagus:
Garlic Scapes:
Garlic Scape & Basil Dip (See Below)
Garlic Scape & Cilantro Pesto (See Below)
Baby Arugula or Baby Spinach:
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| Mixed Greens Salad with Cilantro-Lime Vinaigrette Phot from www.myrecipes.com |
Salad Mix:
Rhubarb:
Mini Green Romaine Head Lettuce:
Pea Vine:
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| Turnip Greens Pesto Pizza |
Baby White Turnips:
Strawberries:
German Butterball Potatoes:
Cilantro:
Hello Friends!
Things are changing fast around here! Over the past week the strawberries have started to ripen and now over two-thirds of the field has red berries. We have cilantro coming in from several different fields and we may be harvesting zucchini by the end of the week! The garlic field is pulling into the next phase of development as it is pushing out scapes, which is the focus of this week’s feature article!
This week we’re featuring two very simple, yet versatile recipes. The first is for Garlic Scape & Basil Dip (See Below). You can use this as a dip, or I’ve given you a few other ideas for how you can use this recipe in multiple ways. I also included one of my favorite recipes, Garlic Scape & Cilantro Pesto (See Below). It is so easy to make a batch of this and keep it in the refrigerator. I mix a spoonful into scrambled eggs in the morning, toss it with hot pasta and chicken for a quick dinner, or use it as a spread on a ham sandwich. Beyond these two recipes, thank you to the member in our Facebook Group who shared a link to 30+ Ways to Use Garlic Scapes! This is a great collection of recipes and definitely worth checking out!
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| Baked Strawberry Cream Cheese French Toast Photo from www.halfbakedharvest.com |
20 Lettuce Wrap Recipes You’ll Want to Devour Stat!. They have some excellent options for using lettuce leaves as wraps and carriers for tasty fillings!
On the non-salad front, I added a little variety to offer suggestions for a few ideas that may serve as a main dish item. These Grilled Shrimp Tacos with Creamy Cilantro Sauce and Grilled Steak with Scallion Ginger Sauce sounded like good recipes to kick off grilling season!
I’ll wrap up this week’s Cooking With the Box article with a few recipes from the sweet side of things. I have not had baked French Toast in quite a while, but this recipe for Baked Strawberry Cream Cheese French Toast looks decadent! Of course, you can never go wrong with a simple crisp such as this Blueberry Rhubarb Crisp!
Have a great week and as always, let us know what you’re cooking up in your kitchens over the next week! I also want to remind you that our Strawberry Day event is coming up very soon on Sunday, June 18. If you are a CSA member, check your email for more information about this event and a link to RSVP. See you next week!
-Andrea
Vegetable Feature: Garlic Scapes
by Andrea Yoder
Garlic scapes are a great example of how interesting and diverse the world of vegetables can be! If you are not familiar with garlic scapes, they are easily identifiable. They are green, long, and skinny and have a natural curl to them, hence we work with the curl when we bunch them.
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| Garlic Scapes in the field |
Garlic scapes are actually a byproduct of growing hardneck garlic. They grow up from the center of the plant and we harvest them in early June, about a month ahead of our annual garlic harvest. Scapes are part of nature’s plan for the plant to propagate itself in the soil. If left unattended, the bulbil on the end of the scape would get bigger and would eventually be so heavy as the scape grows up out of the center of the plant that it would fall down and plant itself, thereby propagating a new plant! We’re cultivating garlic, so we plant a clove of garlic from a full-sized bulb and use that as a means of growing the plant. Since we don’t need the scape to produce another crop, we go through the field and cut them off from the plant so the plant can focus its energy into producing a nice sized bulb instead of a scape.
Up until the early 90’s we used to remove scapes from the garlic plant and throw them on the ground! We were the first farm in the Midwest to start harvesting the scapes for use as a vegetable, thanks to one of our customers from Korea who asked us to save the garlic scapes for her so she could make pickles. We thought this was odd but saved some for her anyway. She was gracious enough to share a jar of pickled scapes with us and that was our introduction to how delicious they are to eat!
Store scapes in the refrigerator until you are ready to use them. They’ll store for 2-3 weeks. If you’re looking for some interesting ways to use garlic scapes this year, check out this article featured at www.practicalselfreliance.com for a list of 30 tasty garlic scape recipes!
Garlic Scape & Basil Dip
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| Photo from www.yellowbirchbobbyfarm.com |
6 garlic scapes
¼ cup fresh basil leaves
1 ½ cups full fat sour cream
1 lemon
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
- Trim the ends of the garlic scapes and roughly chop into 1-inch pieces. Add them to a food processor along with the basil. Process in the food processor until very finely chopped. Scrape the contents out into a medium mixing bowl.
- Add the sour cream, the juice from the lemon, and the salt and pepper. Mix well. Add more salt and/or pepper as needed, to taste.
- Chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld, then serve.
Recipe borrowed from www.yellowbirchhobbyfarm.com.
Serving Suggestions: This is a simple, handy recipe to make as you can use this “dip” to enhance your meals in a variety of ways. Use this dip for fresh vegetables or serve it with grilled asparagus or roasted or baked potatoes, add a drizzle to tacos, grilled fish, pork, or beef, or add a dollop to a bowl of beans or lentils. You can thin it out with a touch of cream and turn it into a creamy dressing to toss with romaine lettuce, or substitute cream cheese for the sour cream and turn it into a spread for sandwiches, wraps, flatbreads, or crackers.
Garlic Scape & Cilantro Pesto
Serves 6 (Makes approximately 1 ½ cups)
1 cup garlic scapes (6 to 8 scapes, or about 1 bunch), cut into 1-inch pieces, tips removed and discarded
1 bunch cilantro, leaves and stems coarsely chopped
½ cup raw pumpkin seeds, toasted and cooled
1/3 cup cold-pressed sunflower oil
2 tsp lime juice or apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
- Combine scapes and pumpkin seeds in food processor and pulse until coarsely ground.
- Add cilantro, lime juice and oil; pulse until evenly chopped. Season with salt and pepper. Use within a week in the fridge or freeze it.
**HVF Serving suggestions: Toss with hot pasta and grated cheese for a quick dinner; Stir into scrambled eggs, use as a spread on a sandwich, mix with sour cream or plain yogurt and use as a dip for fresh veggies.
We featured this simple recipe in our newsletter back in 2015, but I wanted to publish it again for those of you who may be relatively new to CSA. Creative credit for this recipe goes to Dani Lind, a longtime friend of HVF and a talented chef from our area! Her recipe was originally featured in the Edible Madison, Season by Season 5th Anniversary Edition.
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