July 13, 2011 CSA - SCVWD

Beating the heat

What's in the box? 
Strawberries (please please please send me some plastic tubs to put berries in/write your name on the bottom!) Onions or garlic, last of the Red Russian Kale, Violetto Cauliflower, golden beets, (okay I ran out of beets - so someone got green beans), Parisian Market carrots, Romanesco zucchini, cucumbers, portulaca, potatoes and flowers. 

This week's special gift:  Maraschino cherries.

So what about Maraschino cherries?
I love them, except for Leo won't let me buy them because they are full of things that you should never put in your mouth.  As a child, no summer was complete without Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers.  A Shirley Temple is 7-up with a Maraschino Cherry and a wee bit of the juice.  A Roy Rogers is the same thing with cola.  My aunts always made their own Maraschino Cherries.  So, of course, I had to make you try them too.  They are also good on upside down cakes and in some of those 50's cocktails: the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, a Bourbon sour, and now for something completely modern:

Violetto Cauliflower and mystery woman

Safe Sex on the Beach:

3 oz cranberry juice
3 oz pineapple juice
2 oz peach nectar
1 maraschino cherry.

Pour over ice in a chilled glass and stir. Garnish with a cherry.

I knew that I could work sex into this blog if I tried really hard.

Violetto Cauliflower
It turns pale green when you cook it!  It's a mild and sweet Sicilian heirloom.  It's good raw too.  Purple is the original color of cauliflower and this one is sweeter than it's white cousins.  Because of its purple color it possesses a powerful antioxidant called Anthocyanin.  It can be prepared in a Vegetable curry with potatoes and onions or eaten raw, steamed with cheese sauce.  You knew there had to be cheese in there somewhere.

Portulaca/Purslane 
Purslane contains more omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy vegetable plant. It also contains vitamins (mainly vitamin A, vitamin C, and some vitamin B and carotenoids), as well as dietary minerals, such as magnesium, calcium, potassium and iron.   It can be eaten as a leaf vegetable. It has a slightly sour and salty taste.   The stems, leaves and flower buds are all edible.  Purslane can be used fresh as a salad, stir-fried, or cooked like spinach, and because of its mucilaginous quality it is also suitable for soups and stews.  Greeks, who call it andrakla, fry the leaves and the stems with feta cheese, tomato, onion, garlic, oregano and olive oil.  We have ours in salad, with feta cheese!

Haven't scratched yet

On the chicken front:
Dumb Cluck and Little Pecker have returned to the flock.  But we still have eggs that aren't fertile.  We put two new roosters in with the main flock and well, they have a few weeks to figure out what they are there for.  Here's Clipped Wing and her 4 newbies eating my beautiful lettuce.  The lettuce was too bitter for human consumption.  The chicks think it's grand.

What's coming tomatoes and corn and of course more green beans.