Quick ’n Easy Tomato Soup

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, we didn’t receive a vegetable box this past weekend. And since next week is our last and final box of the season (no. 24!), I thought this would be a good opportunity to post a recipe with ingredients gathered from your pantry. This tomato soup has a creamy, velvety texture accomplished by creating a roux. Serve this with grilled cheese sandwiches for a satisfying and warming meal.

Click here to download and print a pdf of this recipe:

Quick ’n Easy Tomato Soup

Let’s Talk Turkey

A few fun facts about Thanksgiving turkey...

• 96% of Americans eat turkey at Thanksgiving. This year, Americans will eat about 46 million turkeys – 345,000 tons of meat
• The turkey presented on the White House lawn for a ‘presidential pardon’ undergoes four months of training, including repeated hand-feeding, in anticipation of the Thanksgiving photo opportunity
• Wild turkeys can see 320 degrees without moving their heads

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

Source: Gourmet Magazine, November 2007
Photo: copyright istockphoto.com

box no. 23 | contents

• Red Cabbage
• Brussels Sprouts
  
• Kohlrabi
• Potatoes
• Beets
• Spinach
• Winterbor Kale
  
• Red Russian Kale
• Chard
  
• Delicata Squash
• Butternut Squash
  
• Popcorn
  

Tomorrow my husband and I will be hosting a benefit brunch at our home for the Angelic Organics Learning Center (AOLC). The cooking is generously provided by the chefs from Sunday Dinner. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to the Learning Center and familiarize you with their mission and the great work that they do for the community and our future food system. The AOLC is the nonprofit sister to the Angelic Organics Farm. Farmer Bob eloquently explained the difference between the two enterprises in this week’s newsletter:

The Farm – where we cultivate & harvest vegetables
The Learning Center – where we cultivate people through relationships & educational opportunities

The Angelic Organics Learning Center helps urban and rural people build local food systems. They offer opportunities to grow healthy food and a better quality of life, connect with farmers and the land, and learn agricultural and leadership skills. The Learning Center, a nonprofit organization, reaches more than 4,000 people each year through its programs at partner farms and urban growing sites in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. For more information or to get involved, please visit www.learngrowconnect.org or call 815.389.8455.

Click here to download a pdf of the Angelic Organics Farm News for box no. 23.

Feta & Mint Dip with Crudités

The upcoming holiday season is a good time to have a tasty and versatile dip in your repertoire. This tangy dip made with only a few ingredients is great for cocktail parties, a potluck gathering or even an afternoon snack. You can serve this dip with crudités (shown here with carrot and kohlrabi sticks), crackers or toasted bread rounds.

Click here to download and print a pdf of this recipe:

Feta & Mint Dip with Crudités

Baked Pasta with Chard

Recipes have a way of starting as one thing and morphing into another. I had been craving a good spinach lasagna with white sauce and with all of the bags of greens we’ve been getting in our Angelic Organic boxes, I thought it would be a great recipe to post on 24 boxes. And I started from a good place – a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. You can’t go wrong, right? Well, there wasn’t anything wrong with the recipe OR the execution, but the results weren’t what I had hoped for. The lasagna was very heavy, very cheesy, really white and didn’t let much of the spinach flavor shine. But there were some aspects of it that I liked. So, after a few trials, here is an updated, revamped recipe that started out as a lasagna and ended up as a baked pasta.

You can use any type of green here – spinach, chard, kale, etc. I happened to use baby chard. You can also substitute frozen, chopped spinach (make sure to defrost first and remove any excess moisture and/or water).

Click here to download and print a pdf of this recipe:

Baked Pasta with Chard

box no. 22 | contents

• Red Cabbage
• Broccoli Florettes
• Kohlrabi
• Lettuce
• Potatoes
• Beets
• Spinach
• Arugula
• Red Russian Kale
• Delicata Squash
• Butternut Squash
  
• Popcorn
  
• Garlic
  

Newsletter Excerpt

Bob writes... The weather has been mostly co-operative although at the moment it is windier than I like. We are now beginning season wind-up projects like putting straw mulch on top of next year’s garlic, removing the buried drip-tape irrigation lines, removing the overhead irrigation lines, winterizing tractors and trucks, and more. Primo and Juan just completed a temporary patch repair to the western side of our barn roof (with a silver tarp). Also, they will soon finish resurfacing our greenhouse floor. Each day we are usually completing a final harvest for a given crop or two. We have been particularly pleased with the broccoli florette/side shoot yields due to the warm late September and October.

Click here to download a pdf of the Angelic Organics Farm News for box no. 22.

Preparing Greens for Recipes

Fall weather brings in a mountain of greens – spinach, chard, kale, choi. This last box, we received four bags of greens! In the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing a number of recipes that call for chopped, frozen spinach (be on the lookout for a Spanakopita recipe and a recipe for Baked Pasta with Chard). But since I have a lot of fresh greens, I started blanching and chopping my own greens and using them interchangeably in recipes. You can use this technique to prepare fresh greens and immediately incorporate them into a recipe or you can freeze the already prepped greens for later use. Defrost and use just like chopped, frozen spinach.

The tool pictured above is great for pressing out excess moisture from greens. A potato ricer turns out these perfect disks of greens, ready for chopping or freezing.

Click here to download and print a pdf of this technique:

Preparing Greens for Recipes

box no. 21 | contents

• Cabbage
• Broccoli Florettes
• Radishes
• Sage
  
• Spinach
• Choi
• Kale
• Chard
• Acorn Squash
• Delicata Squash
• Popcorn
  
• Garlic
  

Newsletter Excerpt

Diana writes... Welcome to the 2007 Winter Share. For those shareholders who have extended their shares you are in for a treat. Besides storage crops such as winter squash and potatoes, we have all our cold hardy crops that sweeten with a frost. As of this date we have had a few freezes at night, leaving an icy layer on the ground and even once coating the windows of my truck. From these cold nights, most people who buy their organic veggies from the supermarket only reap the benefit of throwing on an extra blanket and snuggling into bed. Often their food is coming from California where the temps never dip low enough to sweeten their brassicas and spinach.

We never know how accurate a weather forecast will be nor how low the temperature will dip. However, we have many years experience under our belt allowing us to know the limitations for our crops that are still growing at the end of the season. Bob recently rated our remaining crops from the hardiest to the most-cold sensitive. Here they are: parsnips, Brussels sprouts, sunchokes, collards, red Russian kale, spinach, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli, arugula, radishes, choi, chard, and lettuce. At this time of the year, we are pleasantly surprised at how well the chard has been taking the frosts as well as the arugula (a new addition to our fall line up). This is the first week we are harvesting red Russian kale, a super hardy plant that gets better with the cold. Our most sensitive crop at the moment is lettuce, but it keeps growing. If it pulls through you might be seeing it in a later box.

I planted a lot of these cold hardy vegetables at the end of August, when it finally began to dry up after our record rainfall. Before I got injured in Mid-September, many of these plants were just barely getting their first true leaves. I was concerned they would never live up to their full box potential. Since my injuries, I have not gotten back into fieldwork, but I have seen the full beds of spinach and the over flowing boxes. I like the feeling I get from knowing that all those plants are growing and surviving. I am always amazed at the amount of life contained inside a little seed.

Click here to download a pdf of the Angelic Organics Farm News for box no. 21.