The abundance continues this week as we welcome a few new veggies to our boxes for the first time this season - heading broccoli, cauliflower and a little teaser of the one we've been eagerly awaiting ... TOMATOES!
These three crops are long season crops, which simply means that they take a large chunk of the growing season to mature. Long season crops take up quite a bit of space in the field and they take their time to produce - but we all know they are well worth the wait! These crops also take a lot of extra TLC since they are out for so long as we weed them over and over until they put up a canopy wide enough to shade out the weeds, prune them, trellis them, fertilize them, and trellis them again.. and again! And so now that they are finally making their way to you (and us) we are filled with delight!
The tomatoes have just started producing so we are not yet able to get them into everyone's shares, but soon we will be sending them to everyone! For now we have listed what we have as extras you can add into your box if you just can't wait!
One more fun announcement - this Saturday we are having a Summer Celebration hosted by the store at A Rocha, there will be live music, cobb oven pizza, popcorn, more veggies and flowers, a self guided tour of the site, and other fun festivities. And a fun time to take a peak at the farm where all your lovely veggies are coming from! It will be from 12-3PM at A Rocha (1620 192 Street, Surrey V3Z 9V2) - hope to see you there!
Finally a quick fennel recipe we made up and enjoyed last weekend is included below! If you have any fun recipes you have been making with your veggies please send them our way! We love to hear how you are using your produce!
Cheers!
Farmer Carly
Quick and Easy Fennel Sausage Bake:
Ingredients:
- Butter and or olive oil
- 2 heads of fennel
- 1 red onion
- 3 (or more) cloves garlic
- 1 cup grated Cheese - we used parmesan and Mozzarella but many cheeses could work!
- 2-4 italian sausages (can totally leave this out for a vegetarian version!)
- your favorite crusty bread
- salt, pepper and red pepper flakes
- zest of 1 or 2 lemons
Preheat oven to 375 F
1. Crumble your sausage out of the skin into a pan and cook until done, remove the sausage from the pan
2. chop your onion and fennel into slivers and mince your garlic
3. Melt butter in the same pan you used for the sausage pan (we used a big cast iron so we could pop it straight into the oven)
4. On low heat, caramelize the onion, once browned add in the minced garlic and cook until fragrant
5. Add the fennel and cook until caramelized and soft (note you may want to add a bit of water at this point to help soften the fennel)
6. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes if you like
7. Zest one (or 2) lemons into the pan and mix it in
8. Once fennel is soft (but not soggy) add back in the sausage and mix
9. Top with bread torn into 1/2 inch pieces and shredded cheese (if you are not using a oven safe pot transfer it to a oven proof dish before topping)
10. Bake until cheese begins to brown and bubble and bread is crisp
Enjoy
*PS - for those of you with on farm pick up or coming out for our Summer Celebration we offer some awesome local sausage, cheese and sourdough bread for purchase at our store that would work great for this recipe!
