Happy Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is easily my favorite holiday. No stress of gift giving/getting, dressing up, or any of the other usual holiday rigamarole. Just make a feast of great food, including plenty of pie, and share with the people you love. This year of course was a bit different for many of us, and our family stayed home to do our part. My wife and I were figuring this Thanksgiving was the first in about 20 years that we had not had friends or family over for dinner. We had a zoom with the grandparents in the morning, ate a nice dinner, went for a hike until dark, and came back in for leftovers. We always plan to bake one pie per person, and I am happy to report that even though there are 5 of us, we're down to only part of one pie remaining today at lunchtime!
Before I go any further, we've got a new addition to the Farm Happenings. Farmer Brian from Northcroft Farm will be including a recipe tip with each newsletter to share some of his favorite ways to use the great locally grown products you can find in our Bayfield Foods cooperative boxes. We'll start out the Happenings each week now with a fresh idea to inspire some tasty kitchen creativity.
Farmer Brian's Recipe tip: Tired of the plain old lettuce and tomato burger? Try the Spirit Creek Cortido burger for some extra flare. For the burger combine 1# ground beef with ¼ cup minced onion, 1 garlic clove minced, 1 teaspoon cumin, ½ teaspoon coriander. Cook as desired and top with lettuce, tomato, avocado and a couple table spoons of cortido.
We did a little creative cooking this past week at our house as well, and made an incredible locally topped pizza. To start with, we really like Bobby Flay's pizza dough recipe (and use bread flour - it really does make a crispier crust pizza). And when we make pizza crusts, we usually make a double or triple batch - parbake the crusts for a few minutes, then freeze whatever ones we don't top for dinner that night. That way we've got pizza crusts at the ready for an easy, quick dinner if needed. We like to bake our pizzas at 500 degrees on a hot pizza stone in the oven until done to help make the crust crispy on the bottom. If you don't have a pizza stone, put one on your holiday wish list - you're worth it!
Anyway, Monday night, we topped a pizza with a container of Ewe Rascal Ewe cheese, some sliced fresh red onion, fresh spinach, garlic, and olive oil, then covered with some Mozz cheese (also available from Happy Hollow Creamery) and it was fantastic. Give it a try if you want to change gears from a traditional red sauce pizza - I think you'll like it!
Otherwise, the past 2 weeks have been filled with working on the hoophouse until the short days turn too dark for Farmer Ryan and I to see what we're doing. The end walls, cedar baseboards (no treated wood), hip boards, and purlins are completed, and over half of the wiggle wire channels are screwed on - this is what holds the plastic to the structure. We'll see how productive I can be, but I hope to finish attaching the wire channel tomorrow morning. The nice weather this weekend would be perfect for pulling the plastic over the top and covering the ends, and Saturday afternoon looks pretty calm wind-wise. I might have to press the kids into service to help me get the cover on... the joys of being a farm kid haha. Wish me luck!
Here's a shot of the bed of spinach that will be headed out to you in next week's CSA boxes. This bed is in the center of the small tunnel beside the new hoophouse, flanked by a row of garlic on either side. It's looking really nice, and I think we'll be able to more than double the amount of spinach we've had available the last 2 deliveries. Our first few fall plantings of spinach were several new varieties, and unfortunately they were not very productive in our climate. This variety - called Kolibri - turned out to be fantastic in our tunnels, and I am happy to have found it. We had some trouble a year ago with mildew on our favorite winter spinach variety called Corvair, and it's taken a while to find a suitable replacement. Believe it or not, most spinach eaten in the US is bred to be grown in the irrigated desert of Arizona and California - pretty different growing conditions than we have up here. But I am thankful for small seed companies and seed reps who will take the time to help small farms like ours find varieties that will work in our unique environment.
Speaking of vegetable varieties, it's nearly seed ordering season again. Every year at the end of the planting season I like to sit down at the computer and begin to plan out the following year. What varieties to plant, what varieties to avoid, how much of each to plant and when and where - it's quite the series of spreadsheets. Every year, I whittle down the varieties that we grew into a few select performers that have consistently been reliable and dependable year after year, and I vow not to stray from these solid cultivars. "Hold the line!" I say to myself, "Just stick with what works, and quit trying to evaluate all these new varieties!" Then the new seed catalogs arrive, and weakness sets in... Inevitably I find some new varieties that seem worth exploring - great disease resistance, reliable performers, new improvements on older cultivars - and I need to revisit my plan to make room for them. Sometimes, our standby varieties are discontinued, and we need to look for replacements, so it's not all bad to have a few trials going on to see what else is out there I suppose. With the next Farm Happenings in 2 weeks, I'll let you know what new trials we're planning here at Great Oak Farm for the 2021 summer season.
Winter isn't even *really* here yet, but I am already excited about the growing season!
Yours in community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
