Eaters' Guild

Hello~
It's a snowshoe winter.
We're planning to be on schedule today (tuesday), no changes here. Post-holiday, we're finding the reprieve willed upon us by the season nice--outright quiet at times.  This last week we added another sprout to offer some variety, radish.  These are snappy little plants--great on sandwiches, in maki, in soups and salads.  If you've been with us past winters, you've become quiet familiar with them, and if you remember, our tendency to not start them on time to give them to you greened.  Logistically speaking, we lack the space in a brightly lit window to accommodate the amount of sprouts we grow, so perhaps it is just appropriate for us to give them to you started, with a few days of care and light for optimal flavor and nourishment.  Here's our advice:

To keep the radish sprouts, place the sprouts in a quart jar--you will rinse them by filling the jar with fresh water, use a screened lid (especially manufactured for sprouting) to drain, or if you do not have one of these, cover the jar opening with a towel or with cheesecloth, tightly secure the cloth with a rubberband and drain.  Once drained, you may set the jar (covered with the screen/cloth) in a windowsill.  Sprouts will continue to grow and will become green.  Once greened to your liking, you may keep them in your fridge--use in a few days for best taste.  Rinsing everyday is important.  Sprouts are living, and produce their own heat.  So without regular cooling and mixing, radish sprouts especially, can get funky fast.  On the other hand, the pea sprouts are relatively easy.  THey are ready to eat with a sprout of the root, and you can let them grow for a few days, rinsing as you do so (these are easy to drain in a colander--as can be the radish).  Once you wish to slow growth, again place them in your fridge--if used in a few days, further rinsing for the peas doesn't seem to be necessary.

We are entering the world of blogging.  OF course this necessitates having something to say, and taking the time to say it.  THese qualities have a contradictory nature in our lives as in the winter we have the time with little to tell--in the working season, there's plenty to share but few free sequential moments to send it brain to keyboard....so if we can ask, please be patient with us, it is experimental at best.  I will copy this message to the blog, and you can see what is already there.  To find the blog you can go to LocalHarvest.com, search/find eaters' guild farm (our zip is 49013) and then read our blog, or you may try the link below.

http://www.localharvest.org/blog/9939/

Check it out.  At some time we hope our website can host our blog, and be a resource for farm members and others too.  

Recipes?  Turnips and rutabagas stumping you?  I have my books ready, and try to wow you with incredible white root ideas...Be well and stay warm--LLi

DIlly turnip and carrot gratin--
2C graterd Turnips
Salt
1/3 C butter
3/4 C bread crumbs
2C grated Carrot
1/2 tsp sugar
2tsp fresh dill
Freshly ground pepper
3/4C heavy cream

Preheat oven 350F.  Sprinkle turnip with salt and set aside 30 minutes. Melt half of the butter, saute bread crumbs, set aside.  Squeeze water from turnips, combine with grated carrot.  Melt remaining butter in saute pan and add carrot, turnip and sweetner.  Cook med-low heat stirring often.  Stir in dill pepper and salt to taste.  Put all in a buttered baking dish, pour cream over and top with bread crumbs.  Bake in oven until brown and bubbly.

Scalloped Turnips
4Tb butter
1/2 c onions sliced thin
4C peeled sliced turnips
2 Tb flour
1 tsp salt
Fresh ground pepper
1C milk
1/2C light cream
preheat oven 350F
Saute onions in 1 Tb butter until wilted. Layer in thirds turnips and onions into buttered baking dish, sprinkling  with one-third of the flour and salt , and pat with 1 TB butter between each layer.   
Mix milk and cream together and pour over turnips.  Cover and bake for 30 min., then remove cover and bake 30-40 min , or til tender and bubbly.

We've found that sometimes it's best to begin something when you can no longer escape its traction..or lure.  Like intentions to go up and nail down that loose piece of roof steel, ending its clatter and ringing threats to quit us entirely. Or fixing an old gate to save that 2 seconds extra work each time to open it.  Or this, staring at the blogosphere, starting our blog farm---as if the world were not oversupplied with such things, inedible and vacant of substance as they are.  

If these musings are enough to get you here, at least you won't be disappointed to find yourself in this blog barn.  It's an emanation of Local Harvest which will help you find a lot of the other foods and farms you should be looking for.  So clearly not a wasted click.  Before long and before your eyes glaze you'll want to search by your zip code to find good food nearby.

In this blog, your gonna want to really use your keyword seach option to find relevance.  We will have plenty of people coming here to find important weekly info on CSA pick-up issues, new crops and recipies and scheduling of events.  We'll figure out how to post photos when they are actually better than words.  Periodic newletters will be posted here for all to read as well as general rumblings from the farm scene around here.

It may be mistaken but our intent, too, is to use this as our general farm activity log which is a  requirement of organic certification.  This will be a banal list of deeds and measures about which most will find no thrills.  It may however be an interesting experiement in transparency for us and an extortive way to make us commit to keeping it current.  Any taskmasters among the CSA membership may find comfort in the metrics of our toil.  This component may also archive useful information for other growers furthering a sharing a best practices and shedding of worst.

So we hope this is a warm welcome.  It has been willing you should know.  Soon to come will be recipes and notes for this weeks winter share.  We need the bounce this new endeavor provides to get us into the expansive side of the season, out of the leisure of the cold and dark weeks and minimal chores of winter's deepest.  Thanks for helping confirm our suspicions that blogging is theraputic mainly for the blogger at the expense of the blogged...can you forgive us?