Tzatziki cucumber recipe for a hot day

Tzatziki
1 cucumber,coarsely grated
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
8 ounces yogurt
salt to taste
- Combine ingredients, chill and serve. Delicious with falafel, on a hamburger or for dipping good bread…Refreshing and cooling on a hot day. I used to get this at a Turkish stand at a farmers market in Germany. Love that garlic!

Where did July go?

Whew – how did it get to be August already? We’ve been busy on the farm, weeding harvesting, and still transplanting some later crops. We have a high school student visiting us from Germany for a month, which is a lot of help, and a reminder to have some fun every now and then!
So, what have we been up to? We did get to go camping last week for our annual traditional archery rendezvous in Galeton, Potter County. We enjoyed a beautiful weekend camping and shooting our long-bows.
Right now we’re getting ready for Local Foods week – our farm will be on the Farm Tour August 9th – last year we had more than 100 visitors. Boy were we tired of talking by the end of the day!
Garden is doing well. Squash and zucchini are winding down, second planting of beans had a very short picking window, and garlic is mostly harvested. Tomato and pepper crops are looking very good, so are the sweet potatoes. Cucumbers are producing well, and we’ll have lemon cucumbers coming on in a week or so. Melons and pumpkins are growing nicely on their long vines. We’ve been digging the tastiest carrots, and just beginning to dig new potatoes. Fall seedings of beans, beets, lettuce, spinach, radishes are in the ground and just waiting for some rain.
Our heritage turkeys have produced about 20 offspring so far this season. These will not be ready in time for this Thanksgiving, but will give us a good breeding stock expansion, with possible breeder stock to sell. Our thanksgiving turkeys are staying cool under the pine trees behind the house, and are healthy and growing quickly. Our second batch of broiler peeps is coming the middle of August, and will be ready in fall, reaching maturity in the cooler weather.

Roasted Chicken

We just had our first batch of chickens butchered last week - what a beautiful batch of roasters! roasters in the 6 pound range are hard to come by, and this batch averaged 6 pounds! We had also lucked out the week before when Tom found a stainless steel cabinet type smoker at Penn State Salvage - so we will be able to offer smoked, fully cooked chickens starting with our next batch. We just experimented and smoked two birds, and boy were they DELICIOUS!
People had asked how we prepare our chickens, and here's our favorites:
I like to use the roasted chicken recipe out of the Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook, by Shannon Hayes. It's an excellent cookbook, with a wonderful knowledgeable author who will really show you the way around purchasing and preparing local, grassfed meats.For more details go to http://www.grassfedcooking.com


Chicken Herb Rub
1 tablespoon coarse salt
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablsepoon dreid thyme
2 tablespoons dried oregano.

Mix all these together. Use 2 tablespoons of this mixture and combine with 1 clove of chopped garlic and ¼ cup of olive oil in food processor. Process into a smooth paste and rub over chicken and under skin.

Shannon’s Favorite Herb-Roasted Chicken
Preheat oven to 350F
Rinse chicken, pat dry with paper towels. Rub herb paste all over chicken, being sure to get underneath as well as on top of skin. Allow to sit for 2 hours in the fridge, OR roast immediately for roughly 1.5 hours. Internal temperature of chicken should be 160F in breats, and internal temperature of thigh should be 165-170F. Let rest 10-15 minutes before carving.

Greens, Glorious Greens!

The rains have been generous to us this spring, and after recovering from some flooded early crops, we are now starting to see some of the results that rain will have. One is an abundance of weeds, the other is happy greens.
You'll be seeing an assortment of mild and spicy greens, all so colorful and good for you.

Here's a summary of recipes I've been passing on:

Raspberry House Dressing:
Our daily house dressing is quick and easy: a generous dash of extra virgin olive oil, another generous dash of Tait Farms Raspberry Shrub (sort of like a honey sweetened raspberry vinegar - yum!), plus some salt and freshly ground pepper.

Basic Vinaigrette.
It keeps for weeks in fridge:
1 cup olive oil
4-5 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt
1 to 2 medium cloves garlic, minced
Combine everything in jar. Cover well and shake it up!

Variations:
➢ Add very finely minced parsley and/or other herbs (dill, basil, marjoram, chives etc.)
➢ Substitute different vinegars
➢ Add 1 to 2 teaspoon good quality mustard
➢ For creamy vinaigrette, add 2 to 3 Tablespoons sour cream or yogurt
➢ Add 2 Tablespoons lemon juice plus a little lemon rind

Salad Greens with Garlic Dressing
3 cloves garlic ( or you can use garlic scapes!)
3/4 cup oil of your choice
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon grated parmesan cheese
1/2 tablespoon ground black pepper
1/2 cup milk

Put garlic, oil, vinegar, basil , salt cheese and pepper in blender, process 2-3 minutes. With blender still running, slowly add milk, processing until dressing is smooth and thick. Toss with greens. Covered and refrigerated, this dressing will keep 1 week.

From: Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home

Rule of Thumb:
Be a benefactor with the oil,
A miser with the vinegar, a poet with the salt,
and a demon with the pepper!

Those beloved Garlic Scapes! Plus 2 Scape Recipes

The pig-tailed curly greens you've taken home...They're the immature seedheads of hard-neck garlic.  We remove them so that the plants can put more energy into producing larger garlkic heads, rather than seeds.   AND they're oh so wonderful!   We wish the season for them was longer, but it is very short, so enjoy them now!   Try them chopped coarsely for a delicious garlicy crunch in your salads and stir-fries.

And here's a recipe sent in by a CSA member to help you utilize all those scapes and spinach this week.

Garlic Scape Soup
from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking
I have never tried it but I have wanted to.....

2 Tbsp clarified butter or extra virgin olive oil
2 dozen garlic scapes, chopped with flower bud discarded
3 large russet potatoes, unpeeled and cut into 1/2 inch dice
5 cups vegetable stock or water
2 large handfuls of spinach leaves stemmed
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1/2 teaspoon salt
black pepper to taste
1/4 c cream (optional)
optional garnish with chive blossoms

Heat fat in a large saucepan over medium heat, then add scapes and
saute for 2 minutes. Add the potatoes and stock, cover and simmer for
20 minutes or until the potatoes are cooked through and beginning to
break down.
Remove from heat and add the spinach. Puree using a hand blender or
other blending device (blender or food processor taking care that hot
liquids can easily explode). Season with lemon juice, salt, and
pepper. Whisk in cream if you are using and more salt if the taste is
too flat (in my experience/opinion, potatoes need quite a bit of
salt).
Serve hot or cold.

Garlic Scape Pesto
(recipe adapted from a combination of online sources - http://kalynskitchen.blogspot.com)

1/2 cup garlic scapes, finely chopped
4 T fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup olive oil
3 cups grated parmesan cheese
salt to taste

Put garlic scapes and lemon juice in bowl of food processor with steel blade, and process until scapes are very finely chopped. With food processor running, add oil through the feed tube and process 2-3 minutes. Remove lid, add half of parmesan cheese and process 2 minutes, then add the rest of cheese and salt and process 2-3 minutes more.

Serve tossed with hot pasta. This would also be good on fish, as a topping for bread, or as a seasoning for cooked rice.

Summer is here!

Now that the rain has stopped, and temperatures are up to the high 80's and low 90's - crops are popping out of the ground!     CSA shares are starting with  green onions, garlic greens - oh so tasty just added to just about anything - baby lettuces, spinach and microgreens.     Tiny broccoli heads are beginning to form, and emerald green rows of seedlings have appeared in the dark damp soil.

We're focusing on weeding in the garden right now, as any transplanting done in this heat is too stressful on the young plants.

Our meat birds are managing to stay cool under the pine trees, coming out during the cool early hours and evenings to chase bugs in the grass and sample the clovers.   It's a nice looking batch of birds that will be ready toward the end of the month - you may want to place your order now before we're sold out!

Rain, Rain, Go Away...Come again some other day (like July?)

Hohum, it's been dreary out there.  We've run into a drainage issue in the lower section of the garden, where a lot of early crops were planted.   It's usually a bit wetter down there, but according to our records we have been irrigating our early crops some in the spring - if this spring had been like the last 3 or 4 we would have been doing great.   Alas, it's rained about every other day, and the mud down there is past my ankles.    It's set us back a little with early crops, which had to be re-seeded on higher ground.   

Nevertheless, we all know that it will dry out sooner or later, and we've got an abundance of transplants to set in the ground.    Micro-greens have been started and are doing well.   So far, there mix consists of sorrel, arugula, purple radish, kohlrabi, cabbage, mizuna and purslane - with more being added almost daily.

We did pick up our two beef calves last Wednesday, and they have settled in well with the older "Mean and Ugly" in the field.   Of course, once again, they are neither.      We have been getting our calves from a local amish dairy farm, which raises these calves under excellent conditions, with access to a barn well bedded in clean straw, and a well-managed pasture.   They are also raised on milk, not on milk replacer, which we believe produces a healthier calf.

Sheep or Manatee?

Our two pet sheep, Daisy and Roxy were sheared on Mother's Day.   All shearing activity was closely observed by Mattie and all other farm yard critters!   Both sheep are now on a strict diet - the layers of fat rolls were hard to ignore...And all that just from grass!

May brings cute little critters!

It's May already!  There's lots of peeps in the brooder, two new piggies (Piggly and Wiggly the 2nd), and two steer calves coming this weekend!   

We need to get out and do a lot of hoeing - the moisture in the garden over the past couple of weeks has encouraged the weeds to take off, and we need to knock them back so our lettuce and spinach and peas can get ahead.

We'll also be putting out broccoli and cabbage transplants this weekend, they are looking beautiful!

Kids!

Spring is in full swing on the farm.   Not only did 75 peeps arrive in the mail today, but we also had 50 local kindergarteners spend 3 hours at the farm with us.    It was a beautiful sunny morning, and the kids got to enjoy the finest spring has to offer on the farm: freshly opened apricot blossoms, toads and bullfrogs loudly announcing the thrills of spring at the pond, the very first dragonfly of the season, peeps and strutting turkeys by the barn, as well as a 6 day-old bottle lamb, visits to the compost pile and even a brave garter snake.   The kids even got to pretend they were honeybees and got a first hand experience at "haulin' pollen" in the orchard.

I did get quite a bit of seeding and weeding  done in the afternoon.  Peas, spinach and lettuce are up under their protective reemay cover (protection from free-range poultry!), and onions and garlic were weeded.   The big pear tree in front of the house will be at full bloom this weekend.  It sure is a beautiful, lush time of year.

Orchard showing first early signs of color

The orchard is starting to show amazing color in a few of the earlier trees.   Our evening stroll in the orchard revealed gorgeous shades of pinks in the apricot trees, and amazing blues in the violets scattered at the edge of the orchard.   Mattie picked a  bouquet of violets and red clover, which was pressed immediately for later projects.