Week One: Best Spinach Harvest Ever!

Hello and welcome (back) to the CFK Season for 2009! I am so excited to be getting started. In addition to keeping these weekly posts about what's happening at the farm, complete with shares and recipes, I also am going to be updating my twitter feed on a daily basis, and sometimes more often. So, if you want to follow along with the food, visit http://www.twitter.com/commfarmkitchen You don't have to be a member of Twitter to follow the posts, but they also appear on the left upper side of THIS blog page! Woo.

This has been a great week at the farm. Last weekend 3rd graders from the Rudolf Steiner School came to the farm for an overnight field trip, and their energy really helped kick off the harvest season with Saturday's first harvest.

Rain early in the week led to a late start on Tuesday, but we spent a good afternoon planting lettuce, picking strawberries, and tidying up for Wednesday's harvest. Today we all arrived bright and early and ready to go. We spent the morning picking MASSIVE quantities of spinach and green onions. Then we bunched some herbs and got everything ready for the harvest. It was a beautiful, relaxed way to start our season.

This week's FULL share was:
Green onion - 6
Cilantro - 1 bunch
Dill - 1 bunch
Sage flowers - 1 sprig
Spearmint - 1 bunch
Spinach - 3 lbs
Lettuce - 4 heads (!!)
Strawberries - just a pint

Our first CFK menu will consist of:
Spinach Mushroom Green Onion Quiche from Simply in Season p. 60 --I got the mushrooms in a barter from Michigan Mushrooms at the Farmer's Market last week! They gave me a HUGE bag of mushrooms in exchange for my granola. I think it was a good deal :-)
For those who need it there will also be Vegan Quiche - tofu-based deliciousness!

Katharina's Spinach Sauce - a perennial CFK favorite, I learned this pasta sauce recipe from my friend Katharina (read about her biodynamic training in the previous post). It's deceptively simple and yet incredibly tasty.

Cilantro Hummus - I'll be doing a variation on the Pendle Hill Hummus recipe. There are a lot of funny stories about making this hummus last year, but we don't need to talk about how the chickpeas made a mess all over the kitchen now, do we?

Tamarind-Mint Dressing - A new recipe I found here, this sounds perfect for grilled vegetables and other grilled items...

Scrumptious Spring Salad - lettuce, green onions, sage blossoms, yum!

Lettuce for your salad and sandwich pleasure.

Strawberries - a tiny taste of heaven

Enjoy! See you Friday, and don't forget our orientation--Saturday at 10 am.
peace
Mary

Photos: 1. Chalkboard in the distribution area at the farm. 2. Green onions - yay! 3. Sage flowers - pretty 4. Farmer Paul sets out lettuce 5. Cynthia shows that our car is full of greens.