Circle M Farm

If Circle M was Sesame Street, this week’s CSA box would be brought to you by the word ONION.

Onions are what is happening here, and have been for a while, and will be for some time more. Myself and my daughters have spent hours daily for about two weeks pulling onions, trimming onions, washing onions and packing onions and our skin has pretty much taken on a permanent onion smell. We’ve tried all the folk remedies – scrubbing hands with toothpaste and scenting them with vanilla extract. My mom bought me a stainless steel egg that’s supposed to remove the smell when you rub it between your hands. So far I just smell like minty onions drizzled in vanilla.

Earlier this year a friend visited my gardens and marveled at the amount of onions, shallots and leeks we had growing. She confessed that onions were just about the last thing she’d consider buying organic or gourmet. “I just use whatever is on sale,” she said. And I pretty much felt the same way until I started working at organic farms and realized there was a whole world of onions out there I’d never imagined. (Of course, that is in fact true of most vegetables – once you are growing from seed, you access innumerable varieties that you’ll never see in a store.) So even though I stink, I couldn’t be more thrilled to be pulling these unique flavors and colors out of my ground. Each has special properties and we’ll try to give you some good direction about how to best take advantage of them.

Here’s what else is in the box:

Circle M Summer Salad Mix – This week we’ve got mixed lettuces and cheery edible calendula blossom confetti for color.
Yellow Stuttgarter Onions – These large, yellow, flattened bulbs are strong tasting and firm, so they hold their texture during cooking. Nice for chili. Great for burgers, if you want strong. A Dutch specialty.
Borrettana Cipollini – These small white flattened button onions are an Italian favorite for boiling whole or braising. Mild flavor.
Prisma Shallots – These gorgeous lustrous red-skinned shallots are milder than onions and great to use raw in salads or dressings. Shallots are fun to grow, because one seed or bublet planted in the spring produces a cluster of 3 to 5 large bulbs that lift themselves up and grow almost on the surface of the ground.
Sweet Corn – Boil some water tonight and get these cooked up when they are best! If you don’t like corn on the cob, try the Baked Penne recipe we found in the Williams Sonoma catalogue.
Beets – We thought we’d be bringing you big pickling beets by now, but these are still small and tender. Beets don’t care much for variable weather, and we’ve got days here in the 80s with nights in the 50s. Roasting is the best way to retain all the flavor and nutrients and you can do it in a 350 degree oven in about 40 minutes. Try the Horseradish Sauce below.
Basil – Pesto season is in full swing. Experiment with different nuts. We used walnuts and pepitos last night.
Zucchini – One large to shred into cake, bread or lasagne and some small to slice and saute. What you don’t use promptly can be shredded and frozen in 2-cup bags to use later.
Summer Squash – These yellow crooknecks are remarkably sweet when sauteed in olive oil with sliced shallots.
Cucumbers – You have some green Marketmores and some white Poona Kheeras from the Middle East. Use the dill flowers to make refrigerator pickles.
Hot Peppers – We put the hot peppers all in a bag together. The white ones are Feherozon Paprika, slightly hot. The yellow are Hungarian Hot Wax, a bit hotter. And the little green, red and purple ones are Ho Chi Minh and Bulgarian Carrot Chiles. They are hot and getting hotter as they mature. More to come….
Green Peppers
Tomatillos – These tart green tomato-y things are best used cooked in recipes. See our Salsa Verde recipe below and the link to a visual. We’ve included one ripe tomato – that’s all we’ve got, folks! – to dice and put on top for color.
Herb Bouquet: Cilantro, Chives, Parsley, Dill These bunches are mostly parsley and chives, but the stalky looking stuff is cilantro. Our spring plants are at the end of their lives, and the new planting is too small to cut, but you need cilantro for your Salsa Verde. Peel off the leaves and use in that, then save the seeds which will dry and be coriander, which you can use in Middle Eastern recipes. The dill is just one or two flowers – pick the little yellow blooms off and use to season cucumber and beet dishes, or put a full flower in with pickles.
Flowers – This week we’ve got some fun, odd stuff in your bouquets. The bright red stalk is amaranth, a food plant in many cultures and on our farm an invasive we call “pigweed” because pigs love it! But this is a cultivated variety grown for that awesome color. The flowers are pink cosmos and blue larkspur. The greens include native prairie indigo and asparagus ferns. The grass is some kind of miscanthus.

Dorothy’s Chocolate Zucchini Cake ½ cup butter
½ cup oil
1 ¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup sour milk (buttermilk, yogurt)
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp cloves
2 ½ cups flour
¼ cup cocao
½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups shredded or finely chopped zucchini
½ cup chocolate chips

Cream the butter, oil, and sugar. Beat in the eggs, and add vanilla and sour milk. In a separate bowl mix dry ingredients. Add to wet ingredients in small amounts. Stir in zucchini and chocolate chips by hand. Pour into a bundt pan that’s been lightly greased and bake at 325 for 40-50 minutes.

Roasted Salsa Verde
4 to 7 Tomatillos
1/4 cup chopped white onion
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
2 tsp fresh lime juice
1/4 teaspoon sugar
2 small hot peppers stemmed, seeded and chopped
salt to taste

Remove papery husks from tomatillos and rinse well. Cut in half and place cut side down on a foil-lined baking sheet. Place under a broiler for about 5-7 minutes to lightly blacken the skin. Place tomatillos, lime juice, onions, cilantro, chili peppers, sugar in a food processor (or blender) and pulse until all ingredients are finely chopped and mixed. Season to taste with salt. Cool in refrigerator.Serve with chips or as a salsa accompaniment to Mexican dishes.

Here’s another great pictorial recipe for Salsa Verde.

Baked Penne with Corn, Zucchini and Basil

Beets with Horseradish Sauce