CSA Week 2: How to Store Your Veggies
Tian Tian Farm CSA Newsletter - June 5, 2024
This Week’s Share (L to R, top to bottom):
Mixed spring greens
Lacinato kale
Gai lan
Fava greens
Snow peas
Head lettuce
Dill
Logistics:
Thank you everyone for helping us run a smooth first CSA share!
This week, please bring your wax box from last week back to your pick-up site and place them in the designated spot (it should be obvious). Please break down your boxes before bringing them. Here’s a quick instructional video.
For Ballard members only: Please only pick up your box during opening hours at Fair Isle (3pm - 10pm) Last week, I mistakenly sent the “ready” email before they opened. I apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by that!
Greens, Greens, Greens
Our mixed spring greens, which we call “stir-fry mix” at the farmers market, contains baby leaf tatsoi, komatsuna, baby bok choy, yu choy, and mizuna. We wash and spin your greens so all they need is a little chop, oil, salt, and high heat. Add protein and/or sauce for an easy weeknight dinner. Or throw them in a soup. Or even a salad.
After three years of resisting kale for no reason other than being different, we’ve relented. It’s just too damn convenient. Also, we secretly love kale. During the winter, it’s pretty much the only vegetable we eat. We usually eat it as a salad. Massage your dressing into its leaves to neutralize its bitterness.
Gai lan is our pride and joy. You’ve maybe tried it boiled with oyster sauce at dim sum. I prefer to stir fry it with soy sauce, ginger, and hoisin sauce. Throw the stem in your pan first, then the sauce. When your stems are fork tender, toss in the leaves.
Fava greens exemplify what we at Tian Tian Farm like to call bonus veggies. Fava bean greens have a complex, nutty flavor. They also have the pleasant hollowness of pea vines or kong xin cai (which we would love to grow, but cannot due to restrictions on invasive species). We’ll harvest your beans in a few weeks.
This year we planted a whole bunch of purple snow peas. We intended to plant fewer — just enough to add a few pops of purple in a serving of peas. Instead, we mistakenly planted mostly purple snow peas.
We grow a mix of lettuces for bagged salad, and sometimes we let them get big to harvest as heads. Here’s the mix we use.
This is our first season growing dill. As far as I’m concerned, any new herb at Tian Tian Farm is something to celebrate. Nothing beats harvesting herbs.
On Storage:
Some of you have asked how to best store your vegetables. Good question!
Generally speaking, the sooner you eat your veggies, the better. The quality of any vegetable gradually diminishes the second it leaves the field. But don’t stress if you can’t get to everything right away. Some veggies go faster than others, and even the less hardy veggies will last at least a week (I’d wager two, but I don’t want pie in my face) with the right mix of refrigeration, containment, and moisture.
Greens deteriorate the fastest, but not as fast as you might think! Since it’s Spring, you’re boxes for the next couple weeks will still be very heavy on greens.
If you’re going to eat greens within a couple days, they should be fine in your crisper. If you’d like them to last longer than that, stick them in a clear plastic bag and put the bag in your crisper. Using this method, we’ve been known to keep greens in our fridge for two to three weeks at a time. We actually just pulled the following bag of mixed greens from our walk-in today — our personal lunch greens, not anything we’d sell — after yellow leaves finally started appearing. We harvested them a month ago:
You can treat herbs the same way you’d treat greens. If you’d like, you could wrap them in a paper towel before throwing them in the bag, as they are a bit more delicate.
Roots can last for weeks, even months. We slowly worked our way through fall turnips all winter. Of course, they’ll be tastier if you can eat them sooner, but sometimes life gets in the way and when you least expect it, you’ll find that daikon in the corner of your fridge just when you need it.
One final note on storage: Your CSA veggies (or veggies you buy at the farmers market, or local co-op, or better yet, that you harvest from your garden) will always last longer than veggies you buy at the super market. That’s because they are much, much, much more fresh.
We harvest the vast majority of your veggies one or two days before they arrive at your pick-up spot. And we rush to get them in our walk-in. The supply chain looks something like this:
1) Harvest at Tian Tian Farm on Monday or Tuesday. Direct to walk-in.
2) Deliver to drop off site on Wednesday or Thursday.
3) You pick up your veggies.
When you buy lettuce at the supermarket, it likely followed a supply chain that looked like this:
1) Harvest in California Arizona or Mexico.
2) Transport on a truck for a few days.
3) Distribution center for a day or two.
4) Transport to your grocery store.
5) Sitting at your grocery store, waiting for you to buy for a day or two.
By then time you take that lettuce home and stick it in your fridge, it may have already been seven to ten days since it was harvested.
Since we started Tian Tian Farm, Elizabeth and I have become much less fussy about eating all of our veggies at peak freshness. That’s mostly because we tend to eat veggies that did not sell at market, but also because who has the energy?
Back in 2021, my mother, an anti-waste crusading queen, came to visit. She found a tote of market leftovers that we had taken out of the walk-in to make space, and which we never got around to emptying. It had been sitting outside in the shade for at least a week. I cautioned her against opening the tote, for fear that she would get hit with a whiff of the foulest order. She persisted, and pulled out a perfectly crisp head of bok choy. We ate it for dinner.
Recipe
Potato, Mushroom, Fava Greens, and Dill Soup
Here’s what we had for dinner last night.
Ingredients:
Potatoes, peeled and quartered
Mushrooms
Fava greens, roughly choped
Dill, roughly choped
Garlic, diced
Yellow onion
Chicken broth
Heavy cream
Salt and pepper
Butter
Directions:
Heat pan and butter over medium-low heat. Caramelize onions. Add garlic. When you can smell the garlic, add the chicken broth, potatoes, salt and pepper. Meanwhile, sauté your mushrooms in butter until browned. Once your potatoes are fork-tender, blend liquid mixture. Transfer soup back to pot and add fava greens. Simmer for a minute or two. Serve topped with sautéed onions and chopped dill.
‘Til next time,
Steven