Hope you all are enjoying these bright crisp deep winter days! This time of year these cold snaps sure get me excited about all the warm hearty meals I can make with the variety of seasonal winter roots we have here in Maine. Soups, roasts, mashes are all regular staples. Even though we've had some cold nights, we are now blessed with longer days which is helping all the overwintered greens in our farmers tunnels start to put on new growth and with our next shares you will see more greens return to your share boxes! For now we celebrate the hearty dishes of winter! This Weeks Share features some beautiful Cranberry Beans from Misty Brook Farm. My favorite thing to do with these this time of year is to make a big pot of baked beans! Here's my favorite Baked Bean recipe, adapted from our friend Penny Savage and her Maine Maple Kitchen. Enjoy!
MAPLE BAKED BEANS
Ingredients: 2 cups dried beans (Cranberry, Marfax, Yellow Eye all work great)
1/4 lb Salt Pork (optional)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp dry ginger powder
1 cup onion, chopped
1 tbsp chopped fresh ginger (optional, this makes it nice an gingery)
2 tbsp molasses
6 oz maple syrup
Wash, pick over and soak dry beans overnight. Drain and rinse well. Cover with fresh water and simmer until skins peel when you blow on them. Drain beans but do not discard the water! Put beans and onion in your bean pot, dutch oven, crockpot or any heavy bottomed oven safe pot with a lid.
Cut salt pork into small pieces and cover top of beans with them.
In a measuring cup mix with some boiling water: salt, dry mustard, dry ginger, fresh ginger, molasses and maple syrup. Pour over beans and add water to cover. Save what liquid is not used for adding in later as needed.
Bake at 250 covered for at least 6 hours. Check beans and add more bean or plain water if needed to prevent them from drying out. Leave top off for the last half hour and increase temp to 300 to brown off. Beans should have a thick nice sauce.
Serve immediately directly from the pot or let sit overnight to "season". They also freeze well!
Update from Songbird Farm
It’s a pretty slow season for us on the farm. We still are milling grains weekly for fresh flour and have some cold hardy greens growing in our high tunnel but otherwise most things are resting still. Next week we plan to start our first seeds. This is the time for planning and building up our hopes and dreams for the coming season! What new crops will we try? What new labor saving tools will we acquire? What mess will we get ourselves in?! Dreams...winter is good for them.
Songbird Farm is a small certified organic vegetable and grain farm in Unity, ME. We grow a mix of vegetables on about 4 acres for wholesale markets and have another 15 in grain production. We also have a small stone mill that we use to process our grains into flours.
We've been excited to offer our sweet potato fingerlings through the Daybreak Grower's Alliance this winter.
