The Floodgates Open

Our market stand this week, or: "hey, it's not just radishes!"

Things happened this week. That much is pretty irrefutable. With regards to the farm, excellent things happened. Namely, produce is growing! In the picture above, you can see what we brought to market this week:

• zucchini and yellow squash
• radishes
• spring onion
• lettuce
• arugula
• purslane
• basil (thai, lemon, and italian)
• thyme
• sage
• oregano

It’s really terribly exciting to have more coming out of the ground than just radishes, which had been the trend for the last two weeks. In addition to more produce, we also had 400% more customers than last week! We sold through about 75% of what we had by 10:30am, and by the end of the day  we were left with just a few bunches of herbs. As the market runs until 1pm, we did a lot of explaining to people: “No, there’s more! Come back next week!” Chalk it up to the market having an ad in the paper this week.

In addition to more customers and more produce, we also had more cowbell more heat. That’s pretty good for a lot of things in the field, and pretty bad for a lot of things on the market table. Hence the new greens cooler (note: greens cooler is actually blue in color. Neither you nor I am colorblind. Well, you may be — I don’t really know.)

The last “more” of the week is more newspaper men. Having started with zero of them in previous weeks and zooming up to one this week, they are making up a larger percentage of our customers than ever before. And the market will hopefully be making up more of said newspaper man’s articles, but we’ll have to wait a few more days to see. The slightly-rhyming Rick Hiduck (whose name promptly lodged itself in my head for the rest of the day) of the Rocket Courier came out to see what was up and talk to some of the vendors.

And, of course we’ve got the weekly recipe! These quick refrigerator pickles are easy to make. Our family couldn’t tell that they weren’t cucumbers at a recent cookout.

Quick Zucchini (or squash) Pickles

Adapted from 101 Cookbooks.

Ingredients:

• 2 medium zucchini (or squash), thinly sliced
• 1 1/2 tablespoons fine-grained sea salt
• 1/4 cup (small handful) fresh dill sprigs
• 3 or 4 garlic cloves
• 1 cup cider vinegar or white wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup sugar, preferably natural cane sugar

Directions: 

Toss the zucchini and salt together in a colander and place over a bowl to catch the liquid. Cover and let stand one to two hours. Toss once along the way.

Lightly squeeze excess water from zucchini and pat dry. Pack into a pint size jar along with the dill and garlic.

Combine the vinegar and sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer and boil until sugar dissolves. Pour the liquid over the zucchini, seal the jar and let cool. Place in the refrigerator. The pickles will keep for about one week.

Thunderheads

We’ll leave you this week with some storm clouds moving in on the farm. Allie took this one a while ago, but we haven’t had a great place to reference it yet. Not that right now is all that much better, but hey, it’s your second photo of the post.

If you are curious about the conspicuous lack of post last week, Allie was out in Seattle with her sister (whose great cooking blog I’ll plug: Tessa’s International Cafe). Nick may or may not have taken this as an opportunity to slack on the blog a bit.

I know I promised you chickens last time, and you’ll get them tomorrow. Going to be another scorcher, so I’ll finish up the chicken post while we take the afternoon off. In the meantime, you can check out the new chicken pictures on our Flickr stream.