September 12 & 13, 2012 CSA

Melons and Squash, oh my!

What's in the box:

Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin, Cukes,  Various melons - marked,  Tomatoes, Anaheim Peppers, Bell Peppers, Many types of eggplant,  tomatillos, some okra, some eggs.

The first group this week - Special Gift - Tomatillo Salsa

First of all, let me say that if you were in the second group last week, the green squash was a Chioggia Squash and is great for pasta filling and pasta sauce and all types of Indian Food.

Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin

Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin should be baked whole, pierced for a few tiny vent holes, stem trimmed, at 350*F until it "slumps" and softens after an hour or so.  Take a large spoon and simply scoop the pumpkin out like ice cream. The flesh peels away from the desiccated rind without a shudder and leaves it flat. Puree the flesh in a blender. A 5-pound pumpkin yields approximately 2 1/2 pounds or 4 cups of pulp, enough for two pies. 

Filling:
4 eggs, 4 cups cooked pumpkin puree 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 cup white sugar, Goodly dash of vanilla, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 cups heavy cream, 1/4 cup dark rum or  bourbon, to taste Two nine-inch unbaked pie shells.

Winter Luxury #11

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Lightly beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the pumpkin, the sugars and the vanilla, and mix well. Add the spices and the salt, and blend. Add the cream and the rum or bourbon, and blend well. Pour into the two unbaked pie shells.


Bake for about one hour or until a silver knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve, cold or at room temperature, with sweetened whipped cream.


Why does the Winter Luxury have Warts?   This is the sugar expressing itself through the rind.  Next month you should all receive naked seed pumpkins.  I recommend using these for your Halloween pumpkins and saving the Winter Luxury for pies, pumpkin butter and other sweet things.  This pumpkin should keep for at least 3 months if you store it somewhere cool.  One of my friends puts them behind the couch...now that would not be cool at our house.  Leo takes a dim view of produce taking up the living room.  It's bad enough that seeds have eaten the kitchen.

Melons from the Trial - Northern Sweet

Melons

There were so many different types of watermelons and regular melons that I gave up and just put labels on the melons themselves.  In addition to watermelons,  there are some  Cucumis melo)"

Sakata Sweet:   Introduced by Sakata’s Seeds of Yokohama. This type of Asian melon, or conomon, has been grown in China and Japan for thousands of years but has almost never appears in American markets. Golden, yellowish green, softball-sized fruits. Flesh is fun to eat, very sweet and crisp. 

Farthest North Melon Mix:  This was bred by Tim Peters, a Master Plant Breeder, who's left the world with some darn fine things.  This is an extra early melon,  I believe the first out of this group to be a cantaloupe type, as the melon slips from the vine.

The farm taking on it's Fall Skirts

There are still another 200 melons in the field, so I do believe that we will be having melons for several weeks yet.

Autumn

Is here on the farm.  There's no getting around the Indian Summer, the dust, the drying up of everything and this weekend we will begin transplanting fall veges.  It will be nice to have greens besides NZ Spinach.  And if you didn't get NZ Spinach last week, I'm sorry, all the bags were forgotten in the fridge.  It was so hot when we were harvesting, we put them in the fridge and promptly forgot them.  So guess what we had for dinner all week?

Lots of little sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale, new artichokes!  rutabags, turnips, beets, lettuce (yeah!), endive and more.

Only one group got Okra this week, the rest of you will get it next week.  Southern Living.com has some interesting Okra recipes.

Really, I use it to thicken Spaghetti Sauce and Leo is waiting to have it pickled.  But there are a number of slime free recipes out there if you haven't tried okra in awhile, check them out.

See you next week.  Sorry the blog was delayed.  I couldn't sign in, and I had to wait for Zack to fool around with my HTML code to figure it out.