In the Farm Kitchen

I love the way a bunch of French Breakfast Radishes looks when cleaned up and beautiful. This week’s radishes are some of the nicest we’ve grown in years, so it was great fun to pick them, and even more fun to see them after Sarah finished washing them in the packing house. French Breakfast radishes have a very mild but quite delightful flavor.

The new crop of Peppermint that we planted last summer has finally come along, another sign of the cold, cold soils we have this year. Peppermint is a relatively recent addition to the herb scene, having been first found in a field of spearmint, its much more common cousin, in England in 1696. The leaves of this week’s peppermint may be a little dirty. We usually try to keep the dirt on our farm, where it belongs, but the oil glands on the leaves that hold the peppermint flavor will burst when the leaves are washed, and the flavor components can break down if you wash them too long before using.

Chocolate Chip Mint Cookies

3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 bunch fresh peppermint, chopped
1 1/2 cups white flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips
Preheat the oven to 350 and lightly grease a cookie sheet. Cream together butter and sugars with an electric mixer at high speed. Beat in the egg. Stir in vanilla and peppermint. Sift together the dry ingredients, and add this to the butter mixture along with the chocolate chips. Stir until well combined. Drop by rounded teaspoons onto a lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake 12 to 15 minutes at 350. Remove from the sheet immediately after baking, and cool on a rack.

The hard freeze on Sunday morning destroyed all of the Asparagus that had poked itself out of the ground since the last harvest on Friday. We took the opportunity to rototill very shallowly to knock back the weeds; the asparagus will continue to produce, since the crowns where the shoots originate grow far below the ground. We got some cool new asparagus knives in time for Wednesday’s harvest. Until this week, we harvested with paring knives, slipping them under the soil to slice off the stalks. With over a mile-and-a-half of asparagus to cover, that’s a lot of bending, especially for the small spring crew! Our new asparagus knives look like an especially-aggressive dandelion weeder, with a very sharp fishtail blade on the end of an 18-inch shank; now, we grasp the top of the spear, and jab the fishtail into the ground under the spear. This saves a remarkable amount of bending, and really speeds things up. Now that we are moving through the field so much faster, we rigged up a system so that pickers can drag a box behind them with a rope tied to their belt, leaving both hands free to harvest asparagus.

Garlic Greens this year feel like a little bit of grace. The garlic we planted last fall mostly winter-killed, so we will have a very small crop this year. But the garlic greens we harvested on Wednesday came out of a cover crop of barley and peas that we planted on the ground where we harvested garlic last summer. Use garlic greens just like you would scallions. These are nice and tender.

Garlic Greens Vinaigrette

1 garlic green
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
salt and pepper

Slice the garlic green very thinly, and place it with the vinegar and oil in a bowl and whisk vigorously. Let it sit for about thirty minutes, if you’ve got time, for the flavors to infuse. Add salt and pepper to taste.

This week we harvested the last of the Overwintered Spinach, and are probably serving up the last of the stored Carrots. Our running-behind crops all over the farm are starting to get caught up now, and we are looking forward to some exciting offerings soon.