Kitchen Garden Journal

This blog is supposed to be about the farm and everything that goes into it and comes out of it. A blog, at its best, should be a chronicle of things that happen in real time, written by the one who sets them in motion. Since there's no lack of activity around here, I thought I would have plenty of content. But the challenge is one of perspective.

At a certain point this season, I realized that this blog was becoming much more exclusively about food and the things we like to do with the products of our labor. That's the fun part for me; that's what inspires me to do all this work. And also, I've found, it's what inspires me to write.

I am a bit surprised at how challenging writing about the farm has been for me this summer. Once the grind gets grinding, you just kind of get sucked in and go with the flow as best you can. It's very hard to have any perspective on the relentlessness of it all, like trying to contemplate the meaning and beauty of a wave as it crashes over you and pulls you down.

That's why I was so glad to read our friend Ben James' article in Saturday's Daily Hampshire Gazette. He poetically put into words what I've been either unable to express, or avoiding admitting for fear that no one wants to hear me bitch. Thanks, Ben.

Here's an excerpt. Follow these links to read the whole article, or to learn more about his farm.

Row upon row, repetition rules farm life

I try to squeeze a nickel out of a minute with each pint of cherry tomatoes I sell, but here's what will ultimately last: not the nickel but the flavor of those tomatoes in my sons' memories, so that even as grown men no other food will ever taste as good.

Time on the farm is not static, it's not a given. It's not like a ladder with all the rungs evenly spaced apart. Rather it's a substance, a material, that we try to manipulate just as much as we do the tilth and the fertility of the soil.

How many tomatoes can we harvest before the lightning storm arrives? How many can we sell before they rot? How can we get everybody out weeding the carrots this afternoon, even though there are all those watermelons to pick? And how can I get November to come more quickly, so that Oona and Wiley and I can take a nap together, and the killing frost will give me some hours alone to read?

Amen, brother.

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Summer has burned itself out early. Whether or not the hot weather returns after this rainy spell, our summer crops are pretty well played out. It was a fantastic run, but its inevitable end is near and we’ll soon be left clinging to our sweet memories like so many green tomatoes on the vine.

Not to worry, though. There is much in the fields that will follow, carrying us into the cold season: the flavors less sweet, perhaps; the vegetables more demanding of our time and ingenuity. No more cucumber tomato salads that we can just throw in a bowl and serve.  But we can go back indoors, fire up the stove and roast, braise, and steam our way into fall’s culinary delights.

And, of course, take a little of the chill and damp out of the house before we break down and crank up the heat.

*On a side note, this week is the Loving Local Blogathon, celebrating the local flavors of Massachusetts. Visit In Our Grandmother's Kitchens to read what more than 70 other Mass-based bloggers are writing about local food to benefit Mass Farmers Markets, a non-profit charitable organization that helps farmers markets throughout the Commonwealth (you can make a donation here).

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At this time of year, people often tire of eating zucchini and summer squash.  It can be a relentless vegetable, and has a reputation for wearing out its welcome due to its unchecked effusiveness.

But I really, really love the squash that we grow, and it’s one of the things that I miss the most in the dead of winter. (Especially when I think of all the excess squash we dump or donate.) So I try to make the most use as I can out of this extremely versatile vegetable when we have it around.

Let me count the ways: sautéed and made into a creamy sauce for pasta; simply brushed with oil, salt and pepper and slapped on a hot grill; cut into sticks and blanched and doused with soy and sesame as a Korean side dish; shredded and made into fritters or pancakes; diced and tossed with egg and flour and roasted.

And possibly my all time favorite: cut into fries, dipped in beer batter, fried in hot oil and served with a spicy marinara. See recipe below.

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Every year, about halfway into tomato season, a melancholy—not unlike the dread of “Back to School”—starts to set in. Tomatoes sitting on the counter start to attract fruit flies, and the cruel arithmetic of this brief, sweet time starts to sink in. Every day that passes not spent slurping up a tomato sandwich, the juice running down your fingers and staining the plate red, seems a day utterly wasted.

Indeed, there are more ways to enjoy the bounty of tomatoes—joys that can only be tasted with tomatoes warm from the field—than there are days left in this fleeting season.

This knowledge, I believe, makes the tomatoes taste better. With each bite you can taste the longing of wintertime. That you are soon to be deprived of this sublime pleasure that just arrived makes each tomato that much more precious and beautiful and blessed. The next time you turn around, they’ll be gone. Each one is a gift.

Photos by Candace Hope

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We’ve been slowly sampling our vast array of heirloom tomatoes, some for the first time, some to confirm our devotion for our hands-down favorites. Among the “new” (to us) varieties, the standouts so far are Cherokee green (a green offshoot of the ever-popular Cherokee purple), yellow brandywine and great white.

Now, trying to describe the flavor of one tomato versus another may be an exercise in silliness, but we’re doing our best to inform you here.

The first thing we noticed about Cherokee green is that when you slice it open, it has this incredibly appealing emerald green color, in contrast to its vaguely yellowy skin. And the flavor is really outstanding as well, much more vibrant than some of the others, even slightly spiced-tasting.

The yellow brandywine was one of the first tomatoes to ripen this year so we got to taste it with a fresh palate. It has very light lemony translucent yellow skin and very pale, almost clear flesh. And unlike many yellow tomatoes which are “low acid” (i.e. tasteless), this one has an assertive acidity, just the kind that is required for pairing with bacon and mayonnaise on a BLT.

Great white has a ghostly appearance that I’ve never personally been attracted to in a tomato, though fully ripe specimens do have a lovely reddish sunburst on the blossom end. We grew this one on a tip from a friend for its unique flavor, which some say has tropical fruit overtones.  While I’m not ready to call out its notes of papaya or its pineapple finish, I will say that among really good tomatoes, it's a pretty special really really good tomato.

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We are really excited to be starting distribution this week and we’re looking forward to sharing the harvest with you this season. The Kitchen Garden CSA experience is a true culinary adventure. You will get to sample most if not all of the more than 100 varieties of vegetables and herbs that we grow here on the farm. Every week the contents of the box are completely different from the week before, reflecting the changing season and the incredible diversity of vegetables that we produce. We make an effort to give combinations of things that lend themselves easily to recipes and meals—basil with spring garlic for a pesto, for example.

There will be things that are new to you. There may be things that you don’t especially like. We hope that you try everything with an open mind and use the many recipes here and on The Vegetable Pages of our site for inspiration.

We feel that our blog and our website provide a unique and intimate view into our farm, how we grow the food, and the ways that we like to enjoy it. We have been documenting the work in the fields like never before with pictures and video, and posting updates on Facebook to let you know what’s going on at the farm. It’s our invitation to you to experience what goes into growing your food.

We hope that our online presence will open up opportunities for our CSA members and other customers to engage with us and with each other, and to create a real sense of community. We invite and implore everyone to comment on the blog, to post pictures and recipes of what you create with our vegetables, and to let us know how you like (or don’t like) what we’re offering. We’re a different kind of farm, this is a different kind of share, and we want to create a different kind of community. Please do your part to make this a truly shared experience.

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At the Kitchen Garden, we have officially embraced technology. We are extremely excited about our website: now that we've built it, we plan to use it. The more we get involved with internet communications, the more we see how they can further the goals of the local foods and Community Supported Agriculture movements. We are using the internet to get more information about farming out there, and to attract a community of people who appreciate the one thing about local food that is most important to us: the eating.

We farm because we love food and want to share this joy with others. With the Kitchen Garden C.S.A., we want to create a community of passionate cooks, a community that believes in fresh, local food because it tastes better and is simply more pleasurable to cook and eat.  

The connection shareholders experience is through sharing information. The Kitchen Garden harnesses online media and social networking to further the goals of Community Supported Agriculture: a desire for community and a connection to the food we eat, and the people who grow it.

We hope that our website is a resource for cooks, whether they are CSA members or not. We write our own recipes and share many tips and techniques for making tasty dishes from around the world. We now have a Facebook page where you can connect with us and one another, to keep in touch and share stories and recipes. And now that we have iPhones, we can post photos and videos instantly from the field while we're doing what we love.

Welcome to our version of Farmville. Real farming in real time.

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I am just back from a weekend trip to Montreal. Being in that city this time was a badly needed shot of French culture right into the arm. Tempered in good measure by a dose of Canadian friendliness and lack of pretension, my visit was inspiring on many levels.

Going to Montreal is like a geographical slap in the face. That there is a whole metropolitan culture beyond the desolation of northern New York never ceases to amaze me. And even though I am way more Canada-literate than most Americans, being there reminds me of the severity our collective Canada-denial. Case in point: when I think of Northeast cities, I think Boston, New York, Philly, DC. It never even occurs to me to look up. But Montreal is truly one of the great Northeastern cities, and so close.

And it’s now official: I need to go there more than once every three or four years.

I need to be in a place where you can count on good baguettes: not just one or two places, but ALL of them. Can you imagine if bakeries in the US just happened to stock four kinds of paté? People would laugh. Then the place would go under. It’s just nice to be in a place where French things are French and don’t also have to reflect American trends and tastes (or lack thereof). French food in the US unfortunately has that in common with Chinese food.

As you can tell, I carry around way too much snobbery and bitterness. And in Montreal, I witnessed a culture of warmth and openness that somehow doesn’t sacrifice coolness or good taste. Strangers are assumed to be sympathetic. I can’t but think if I lived there I would be a better person.

My trip to Montreal was truly inspiring. Most of all, it seems to have inspired a bad case of city envy and fantasies of relocation. If anyone knows the lowdown on emigration, please let me know.

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I love winter food as much as the next guy: potatoes a million ways, root vegetable soups, slow cooked fatty meats, entire meals composed of treasures from the cellar, pantry and freezer. But I have to admit that with nothing much happening in the fields, the dead of winter is the one time out of the year when my cooking is suddenly free of the burden of seasonality.

For once, there is no relentless parade of transient, seasonal delicacies pounding on my kitchen window. It is one of my guilty pleasures that in winter I can go to the supermarket, linger in the produce department, find inspiration in the miracle of freshness, and actually buy stuff. I love buying vegetables. It’s so easy. And I never get to do it during the growing season; there’s always something wonderful I’ve grown left over in the cooler that I feel compelled to cook with, or some blemished cast-off begging for salvation.

At one point a few years back, I thought that winter would be an ideal time for travel to the hotter parts of the globe. We got in one such trip to Thailand in 2007, and then proceeded to have two children. Now I do my tropical getaways in the privacy of my own kitchen. And it must be said that nothing perks me up out of the winter doldrums like a blisteringly hot and tangy green papaya salad studded with raw garlic, fresh herbs, and grape tomatoes from god-knows-where.

Of course there’s nothing quite as special as a Thai salad made with our own cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and cilantro at their peak of freshness, but hey--August only lasts so long this far from the equator.

When it’s cold outside and I get the urge to crawl out of my root cellar, I head to Food Zone in Springfield. This is a full size supermarket that caters to Forest Park’s incredibly diverse community of Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, and everyone else in between.

It’s worth a trip just to be enveloped in the sheer other-ness of the place. (It also seems to be one of the best run supermarkets in the area.) And of course, you can stock up on all those great items of produce that are not in season any time of year in Western Massachusetts: plantains, yuca, mangoes, coconuts, sugar cane, countless unidentifiable Southeast Asian herbs and massive piles of tropical roots.

The highlight, though, for sheer wow factor, are the mountains of rice, beans, frying oil and Malta Goya that tower above the center isle like a cross between midtown Manhattan and a Mayan temple.

I have become somewhat of a Southeast Asian food zealot this winter, honing my craft of this exuberant cuisine of perpetual summer as life outside my window lies trapped in suspended animation. Nothing tastes better to me than the combination of chilies, garlic, fish sauce, palm sugar and lime juice over raw and crunchy vegetables, lemongrass-marinated grilled meats, steamed fish, sticky rice, and plain blanched rice noodles, everything infused with the aromas of cilantro, mint, and Thai basil. The contrasts of flavor are as stark as jumping in a frozen lake fresh from a steaming sauna.

I’ve been finding inspiration reading the many incredible food blogs that cover Southeast Asian food. For instant access into this amazing world of flavor check out Rasa Malaysia, Chez Pim, and Viet World Kitchen. Who needs cookbooks anymore when there are real cooks offering their expertise for free?

Having thrown my lot down squarely in the local foods camp, I know as well as anyone the pleasures of fresh food grown at home and eaten the day it’s picked. But being so focused on local foods, local markets and local communities for so much of the year I relish the opportunity to step outside of all that for a moment and appreciate the best things that the other side has to offer: the different communities, cultures, and cuisines that we cohabitate with in our cosmopolitan society, and the fresh foods that we can rely on throughout the barren months if we so desire them. For the winter-weary locavore, these are the true gifts of globalization.

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Greetings from the farm! Nothing at all is growing. What few crops were left in the field at the end of November have long since perished. But that doesn't stop us from eating our own vegetables several nights a week.

Actually, we tend to spend more time and energy cooking with the produce from our farm during the winter. And I'm glad for it, because at the height of the season when we're putting in 12 hour work days, cooking is often the last thing we want to do. But eating our own veggies this time of year is only possible because we devote a special effort during the growing season to canning, freezing, and setting aside the proper amounts of storable crops. You should do this, too. With a little planning and understanding of some basic techniques, food preservation is pretty simple. The first thing to think about when setting food aside is what you are actually going to enjoy eating during the winter; it is just as important to know what not to preserve. When I first became interested in food preservation, I would spend hours making jams and pickles that would just sit on the shelves. My pickles weren't very good, and I like my toast plain, when I eat breakfast at all. Let's just say moving day was a sad one.

Through the years, I have honed my list. I cannot live without canned tomatoes any time of year, so I put away cases of tomato puree and whole peeled tomatoes. We freeze peas, shell beans, hot peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, and a variety of greens (broccoli rabe (see photo), turnip greens, kale, chard, spinach). Strawberries and blueberries are also a cinch to freeze. We set aside enough garlic to get us through til March, and try to avoid selling all of the onions and potatoes, which doesn't always work. Canning tomatoes is time consuming and exhausting, but not disproportionate to the enjoyment I get out of having them. The rest of what we save is a snap: blanch and freeze or simply tuck away in the basement. It's easy and anyone who likes to eat local food should make it a summer ritual. Detailed instructions for preserving all of our vegetables are found on The Vegetable Pages.

If you missed the opportunity to preserve food this year, be sure to check out Winter Fare in Greenfield on Saturday, Feb. 6 from 10-2. (We won't be selling there because we sold everything we grew this year!) There's also a locally grown Pancake Breakfast to support the Northampton Survival Center at Enterprise Farm on Saturday Jan. 30 from 9-noon.

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