Welcome to the 21-22 Winter CSA!

It is here, the start of our 7-month journey of eating Central Oregon style! The next few months will be a tour through the miracle that farming in Central Oregon is. Each month you will get a crate of fresh greens and storage vegetables. All certified Organic. All nutrient dense. All full of the Central Oregon terroir. And, if you signed up for the meat CSA, you’ll receive a 10-lb bag of mixed meat each month. Our meat is pastured, chemical and GMO free, born and raised and processed right here. In terms of eating local, supporting your community, and filling yourself with delicious, nutritious food, it doesn’t get much better than your next 7 months.

We worked hard this past summer to grow so many storage vegetables we can hardly see straight! Potatoes, alliums, beets, celeriac, parsnips, carrots, winter squash, sweet potatoes. These were all planted in the early to mid summer, tended, weeded, witnessed, harvested, cleaned, and packed away for the winter by our farmers.

In late July we started our first succession of winter greens from seed and spent until last week growing additional successions and planting them in our hoops. It always feels so optimistic and wildly risky to start growing a vegetable called “Siberian Kale” that excels in cold winter temps in July. But this move allows us to have fresh greens all winter. We aim to include fresh greens with each CSA share. Sometimes the weather gets the best of us, but we almost always succeed.

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday and can’t wait to watch you open your monthly vegetable share. It always feels a lot like Santa on CSA day. We love the joy that spreads across your faces at what our corner of Central Oregon can produce as the days gets shorter and colder.

Our baby Siberian Kales, planted over the past 2 months, are getting bigger by the day! Our new root washer has gotten a major workout over the past month as we have harvested, washed, and stored all our winter storage crops. Now it is getting ready to hibernate until next August. 

Your November CSA share

This is a Sunday estimation of what we will be harvesting next week. We have been keeping an eye on the weather, the hoops, and our storage crops and have a pretty good idea of what is out there and ready to be harvested and packed, but we won’t really know until we start packing. Consider this a very educated guess.

This month, we think your Vegetable CSA share will include:

Cabbage
Carrots
Leeks
Winter Squash
Potatoes

Kale
Daikon Radish
Lettuce
Green Onions

Our Meat share this month includes a whole roasting chicken, beef soup bones, and ground beef.

Recipe Roundup
Cabbage, Potato and Leek Soup
(Adapted from Melissa Clark’s recipe on the New York Times Cooking website)
I made this last weekend and it was so sweet and delicious!

INGREDIENTS
optional 1 lb Italian sausage, seasoned ground beef, or ground pork
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 medium leeks, white and light green parts, thinly sliced
1/4 to 1/2 cabbage, shredded
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
4-6 purple viking potatoes, scrubbed and diced
4-6 cups chicken or vegetable stock
2½ teaspoons kosher salt
2 thyme branches
½ teaspoon black pepper
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, to serve

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. If using, cook the meat in your soup pot. Add the butter to the pot and melt, add the leeks and cook until soft and golden around the edges, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the cabbage and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until cabbage begins to caramelize, about 10 minutes.
  2. Stir in potatoes, stock, salt, and thyme. Bring soup to a simmer and cook, partly covered, until potatoes begin to fall apart, 45 to 50 minutes. Take a potato masher or spoon and further break apart the potatoes. You want to find a few chunks of potatoes in the soup, but mostly you want the potatoes to thicken the soup and add their creamy goodness to the broth. Add more water, as needed, to reach the desired consistency. Season with black pepper and serve, topped with cheese.
Chef’s Beef Bone Broth Recipe

There are a million and 1 recipes out there for how to make broth and stock, but here is a simple go to recipe. You don’t need to measure anything!

INGREDIENTS
Beef bones
carrot tops and/or chopped carrots
celery ends and/or full stalks
chopped onions and/or onion skins you have been saving in the freezer

If you want to turn this broth into a stock, add seasonings (basil, bay leaf, Italian seasonings, salt, pepper corns) and white wine or cider vinegar. 

INSTRUCTIONS
Add all of these to a stock pot and cover with water. Cook for as long as you can, at least 3 hours. The longer it cooks (think hours) the more savory and concentrated it will be.

Strain the broth and freeze in usable increments or use at once. I like to freeze in muffin cups so I can pull the amount I need and don’t have to thaw a large amount. But pint or quart jars are great too.

Whole Roasted Heritage Chicken 

INGREDIENTS
1 whole chicken
1 stick butter, softened or 1/2 cup lard, softened
salt & pepper
chopped fresh herbs
optional White wine or chicken stock

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Take the chicken out of the fridge 1 hour before cooking to bring to room temperature.
  2. Preheat oven to 300F. Remove any remaining pin feathers, wipe chicken and pat dry with a towel.
  3. Combine herbs, salt, and pepper and softened butter or lard. Slip butter or lard mixture between skin and chicken meat over breast meat. Season inside of bird with salt and pepper. Place the chicken, breast side up, in a roasting pan with sides. Optional: Add white wine or chicken stock to the bottom of the roasting pan in a shallow layer. If you have a rack, use it. If you don’t, don’t worry about it but forgo the liquid layer. 
  4. Cook chicken for one hour at 300F, then turn oven temperature up to 400F for an additional 5-10 minutes to brown and crisp the skin. Heritage breed chickens require a long, low temperature to help break down the intramuscular structure. The chicken will be tough if cooked a a higher temperature for a shorter amount of time. Cook to an internal temperature of 165F.
  5. Pull the chicken from the oven and let sit for 10 minutes at least before carving.
  6. Other fun things you can do is stuff the inside of the bird with halved citrus like oranges, lemons, or limes to add some moisture and flavor. You can slip halved citrus between the skin and the meat of the bird with the lard/butter for added moisture (make sure the citrus is skin to skin and flesh to flesh).