B WEEK – August 11, 2009

Storage Tips for this Week's Share

Potatoes: Potatoes should be stored in a cool, dry place away from light. Any moisture will encourage sprouting (avoid the refrigerator!). Avoid storing potatoes with onions, as the onions will encourage potatoes to spoil.
Eggplant: Store your eggplants uncut and unwashed in your refrigerator in a sealed plastic bag. This way, eggplants will keep for up to a week. You can freeze eggplant for up to six months after blanching or steaming.
Tomatoes: Store tomatoes at room temperature to promote flavor, healthy appearance and freshness. Temperatures below 50 degrees will destroy the natural sugars in tomatoes. Tomatoes can be refrigerated for use at a later time but should be served at room temperature for optimum flavor.
Cilantro: Set cilantro into a small container with 1 to 2 inches of water, covered loosely with plastic wrap. Cilantro can be refrigerated for up to two weeks.
Sweet Peppers: Place whole, unwashed peppers in a sealed plastic bag and refrigerate for a week or more. Store sweet peppers unwashed.
Squash Blossoms: The shelf life for squash blossoms is brief. Gently rinse in a pan of cool water and store in ice water in the refrigerator until ready to use. The flowers can be stored for a few hours or up to 1 or 2 days.
Apricots: Apricots ripen at room temperature, but you can speed the process by placing them in a paper bag with an ethylene gas-producing fruit (apple, pear, banana). Keep apricots away from direct sunlight or heat. A ripe apricot will yield to a gentle squeeze, and will refrigerate up to 2 days, unwashed, in a paper or plastic bag
Donut Peaches: Once ripe, a peach will keep in the refrigerator up to one week. Do not store unripe peaches in the refrigerator, in a plastic bag or in direct sunlight.; they will ripen in a closed paper bag in one to three days.


Faces of Fort Greene CSA: Coordinator Edition
Stephanie Goichman, Volunteer Coordinator


Founder of the Brooklyn Bike Brigade Parade. Also a Journalist, Singer-Songwriter, Circus Hooper, Fire Performer, Dancer, Audio Tech, Seamstress for the Band, Idea factory and generally Giggly! Going to Burningman in a few weeks! I care about where my food comes from and I am an Aquarian with Sagittarius rising.



This Week's Recipe: Tortilla Española

6 servings (serving size: 1 wedge)

6 cups thinly sliced potatoes (about 3 pounds)
2 cups thinly sliced sweet onion
Cooking spray
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
4 large eggs
Oregano sprigs (optional)


Preheat oven to 350°.

Place the potato and onion in a roasting pan coated with cooking spray. Drizzle with 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons oil, and sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Toss well. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until potatoes are tender, stirring occasionally with a metal spatula to prevent sticking.

Combine eggs and 1/4 teaspoon salt in a large bowl. Stir in potato mixture; let stand 10 minutes. Heat 1 teaspoon oil in an 8-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat. Pour potato mixture into pan (pan will be very full). Cook 7 minutes or until almost set, gently shaking pan frequently.

Place a plate upside down on top of omelet; invert onto plate. Carefully slide omelet cooked side up into pan; cook 3 minutes or until set, gently shaking pan occasionally. Carefully loosen omelet with a spatula; gently slide omelet onto a plate. Cool. Cut into wedges. Garnish with oregano, if desired.
- from Epicurious

Opportunities for Involvement:

* Share your photos on the Fort Greene CSA Flickr page by sending photos to ryanscott.photography@gmail.com!

* If you have an idea for a great member event, let us know! We are always open to suggestions to make our CSA an integral part of our Fort Greene community.

* If you're web savvy, we can always use help maintaining our website. Have other special skills? Email us at volunteer@fortgreenecsa.org and let us know how you'd like to help out. The CSA is for all of us -- let's make it a fantastic season together.

August 5th Newsletter

A WEEK – August 5, 2009

Faces of Fort Greene CSA: Coordinator Edition
Cambra Moniz-Edwards, General Coordinator

Cambra is originally from Northern California. She moved to the Clinton Hill area when she first came to New York 3 years ago, and can't imagine living anywhere else! She joined the Fort Green CSA last year, and liked it so much that she jumped at the chance to help organize its second season.

Cambra recently earned her Master's degree in Media Studies (with a focus on radio and sound art) from The New School in Manhattan. She's enjoying using the summer to travel, read, cook, and look for a job!


Photos taken by our ever-talented CSA member Ryan Scott. Check out our Flickr page if you haven’t already at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28816593@N07/

Using It All Up by CSA Member Ann Monroe

I have to start with a couple of confessions. First, I don't do beets. I don't like them, so I don't cook them. (I did once try a “Chocolate Surprise Cake” - the surprise being that there were cooked beets in it – but while it's true you couldn't taste the beets, you couldn't taste much chocolate either.) So no help from me on beets.
Second (and I don't know if this is a confession or a boast), I am the one who made a ruckus about all that cabbage, cucumber and beets, the result being that this week we're getting fennel, peppers & basil instead. If you don't like fennel, I apologize. But how can you not like fennel?
Fennel: Since we had cabbage last week, I tried a fennel and cabbage slaw. Basically a cole slaw with a mayonnaise dressing with the addition of sliced fennel, toasted ground fennel and anise seeds, and chopped fennel fronds. In spite of all that fennel, it didn't taste all that different from ordinary cole slaw, but if you're cautious about fennel, it might be a good place to start. Having gotten the cabbage out of the way, I moved on to my number one favorite fennel dish: fennel and radish salad. It's very easy: thinly sliced fennel, thinly sliced radishes, dressed with oil and lemon, sprinkled with chopped fennel fronds. Heaven.
Cucumber: I've never cooked cucumbers before, but this week I did – twice. First. a cucumber and shrimp curry. Toast curry powder in oil, add chopped onion, then the shrimp. When the shrimp is barely pink, remove it, and toss the cubed cucumbers in the oil-and-onion. Add a little broth and simmer briskly till the cucumber's just tender and the broth has thickened a bit. Stir in your choice of creamy liquid (cream, sour cream, yogurt, coconut milk), put the shrimp back in to warm up, and serve.
On to the very odd-sounding cucumber and gooseberry soup. (Google it in quotes and you'll find only two hits, both for this recipe.) Cook a chopped onion in butter, add peeled, chopped cucumbers (3-4), and a couple of potatoes, also peeled and chopped, and a cup of gooseberries, and stir them around. (Several of the Ft. Greene Greenmarket farmers are selling gooseberries right now. If you like rhubarb, you'll like gooseberries.) Then add chicken broth, cook until everything's tender, and puree. (Best done in a blender – in a food processor it comes out a bit chunky.) Add as much sour cream as your conscience and waistline will allow, and serve with a dollop of sour cream on top. (The recipe says to add strips of smoked trout or salmon, but I can't report on that because my husband accidentally bought unsmoked salmon. But it sounds good.) You can serve it warm or cold, but I think cold is better. It's rich and a bit sour and very very good.
Plums: Ah, lovely plums. These, bless their hearts, turned out to be easy to stone (many varieties are not!). I made a honey-plum crisp with half of them (google “plum and honey crumble” - yes, another English recipe – but who makes better desserts than the Brits?). Basically, you cook the plums lightly in butter with honey and brown sugar, then top with a mixture of flour, ground almonds, butter and sugar, and bake. Serve warm or cold, with cream or ice-cream or by itself.
The rest of the plums (apart from the ripest, which we kept to snack on), I baked with vanilla sugar – an extremely good way of cooking both plums and apricots. (Vanilla sugar is plain old white sugar that's been stored in a jar with a vanilla bean or two.) You can serve them as is, possibly with a mild cheese. But I didn't have enough vanilla sugar left, so mine were too sour. Solution: add some powdered sugar (and maybe a bit of brandy), puree them, and freeze them into a sorbet.


Ann Monroe blogs about food and sustainability at www.annmonroe.com

Storage Tips for this Week's Share

Tomatoes: Store tomatoes at room temperature to promote flavor, healthy appearance and freshness. Temperatures below 50 degrees will destroy the natural sugars in tomatoes. Tomatoes can be refrigerated for use at a later time but should be served at room temperature for optimum flavor.
Corn: Store corn in the refrigerator for up to three days. Keep the husk attached to the corn during storage; it will help protect and retain the corn’s moisture content. Cook sweet corn as soon as possible
White Onions: Onions should be kept in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, but beware of the moisture accumulation that causes them to spoil. Eat them within 2 weeks.
Basil: Store basil dry to prevent the leaves from turning black. Basil that is to be used within five days should be wrapped in a dry paper towel and kept in an airtight container at about 50 degrees (you can wash it just before use).
Red Amaranto (Callaloo): Keep Red Amaranto (Callaloo) greens refrigerated in a plastic bag for up to 3 days.
Beets: Remove the greens, leaving an inch of stem. Keep the greens unwashed and refrigerated in a plastic bag. Store the unwashed beet roots in a plastic bag as well. Placed in the crisper bin, they will keep for several weeks.
Apricots: Apricots ripen at room temperature, but you can speed the process by placing them in a paper bag with an ethylene gas-producing fruit (apple, pear, banana). Keep apricots away from direct sunlight or heat. A ripe apricot will yield to a gentle squeeze, and will refrigerate up to 2 days, unwashed, in a paper or plastic bag
Red Sugar Plums: Ripen firm plums at room temperature in a paper bag, with the top folded over but not sealed, for a couple of days. Ripe plums should keep in the refrigerator up to three days.
Sunflowers: Place in water. Inhale and enjoy!

This Week's Recipe: Curried Callaloo

1/3 cup of Sweet Bell Pepper, chopped and de-seeded
3 Scallions, crushed and chopped
1 tablespoon Vegetable Oil
3 cups chopped Callaloo leaves
3 Medium Potatoes, diced
½ cup Fresh Corn
2 Sprigs of Thyme
1 Tomato, chopped and de-seeded
½ cup Curry

Heat the vegetable oil in a saucepan; sauté the scallions and bell pepper in the vegetable oil. Add the other ingredients and let simmer for 7 minutes while constantly stirring.

Serve hot with Yams, Dumplings, or Boiled Green Bananas—or as a side with anything!

Opportunities for Involvement:

* Share your photos on the Fort Greene CSA Flickr page by sending photos to ryanscott.photography@gmail.com!
* If you have an idea for a great member event, let us know! We are always open to suggestions to make our CSA an integral part of our Fort Greene community.

Make your own compost at home!

On July 22, member Ann Monroe brought her homemade worm bin to the distribution tent to give a lesson in how to make your own compost, at home! Below are the instructions that she typed up, so those who couldn't catch her in person can still get in on all the good, green fun. Enjoy!

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN (CHEAP) WORM BIN

If you've googled “worm bin” you know that you can buy very expensive ones. Here is a cheap one. (Adapted from http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/Easywormbin.htm – which has pictures! - but which is dead wrong about how to harvest worms. I've tried their method, and the one below is much easier. Gives you nicer compost, too.)

Materials Needed
• Two 8-10 gallon plastic storage boxes (dark, NOT see through!) Rubbermaid makes them. We got ours at Lowe's for about $5 each but they don't seem to have anything smaller than 14 gal anymore – which would do at a pinch. (NOTE: DO NOT get bins with wheels or without lids. Plain lidded bins is what you want.)
• Drill (with 1/4" and 1/16" bits) for making drainage & ventilation holes
• Newspaper
• About one pound of red wriggler worms

Step 1: Bookmark this site: http://www.redwormcomposting.com/. Bentley is a fount of information on all things wormy, and if you buy your worms from him, you can email him for help if you have problems and he really will get back to you. (A pound of red wrigglers – which is what you want – will cost $35, but assuming things go well, it's the only pound of worms you'll ever have to buy.)

Step 2: Drill about twenty evenly spaced 1/4 inch holes in the bottom of each bin. These holes will provide drainage and allow the worms to crawl into the second bin when you are ready to harvest the castings.

Step 3: Drill ventilation holes about 1 – 1 ½ inches apart on each side of each bin near the top edge using the 1/16 inch bit. Also drill about 30 small holes in the top of one of the lids.

Step 4: Order your worms (worms from the garden won't work as efficiently & besides, do you really want to dig up a pound of worms?)

Step 5: A day or two before your worms are due to arrive, prepare bedding for the worms by shredding newspaper into 1 inch strips. Worms need bedding that is moist but not soggy. Moisten the newspaper by soaking it in water and then squeezing out the excess water. Cover the bottom of the bin with 3-4 – or more - inches of moist newspaper, fluffed up. Bury about 1/2 pound of food scraps in the bin.

Step 6: When the worms come, add them to the bedding. Cover the bin with the lid that has the ventilation holes in it.

Step 7: Place your bin in a well-ventilated but easy to reach area; we keep ours in a corner of the living room. Don't put it where it gets direct sunlight. Place the bin on top of blocks or bricks or upside down cans to allow for drainage. (You can use the lid of the second bin as a tray to catch any moisture that may drain from the bin. This "worm tea" is a great liquid fertilizer. )

Step 8: Feed your worms on a schedule that's convenient for you. A pound of worms will eat roughly ½ pound of scraps a day. After a while you'll get a feel for how often to add food. In the beginning, it's better to add too little than too much; if the scraps decay faster than the worms can eat them, your bin may begin to smell. But until you get a feel for it, you should check them at least every other day. Bury the food each day in a different part of the bin so you can see how they're doing.

Feed your worms a varied, vegetarian diet. (They will eat the food faster, reducing the risk of smells, if you cut it into small pieces.) They prefer food that has begun the rotting process; an easy way to do that is to put bags of scraps in the freezer overnight (which softens them) and thaw them the next day before giving them to the worms. Don't feed them dairy, meat, fat, feces...anything animal; they don't like it and it will attract nasty bugs. Or worse.

When the newspaper is all gone, the food scraps mostly gone, and the material in the bin looks like very soggy dirt, it's time to harvest. (Now you know why you bought two bins.) Fill the empty bin (drilling holes in it as you did the in first if you didn't do both at once) with damp newspaper, bury about a pound of food scraps and let them ripen for a day or two. Then put the old bin directly on top of the newspaper in the new bin.

Leave the lid off the old bin, and dig through it thoroughly, reaching into corners (a garden fork is good for this) as often as you can remember to – several times a day is good. (The worms will not climb out – all they want is to get back into the dark.) DO NOT FEED THE WORMS IN THE OLD BIN ANY LONGER. You want to make their lives unpleasant so they will move down.
As the bin dries out, and as you disturb them, the worms will begin to crawl through the holes in the old bin into the new one below. After a few days, when the top bin has gone from sodden to damp, and most of worms are gone, put the lid on the bottom bin and start feeding it. (If you leave the old bin on top of the lid, you'll find more worms coming out and landing on the lid and you can brush them into the new bin.) When you're pretty sure the worms have all left the top bin, you can use or package the compost, empty and rinse the bin, let it dry and then put it away until the next harvest.

July 1st Newletter

B WEEK – July 1, 2009

Storage Tips for this Week's Share
Kale: Keep dry, unwashed greens in a sealed plastic bag in the fridge. Will keep approximately 2 weeks.
Zucchini: Store them unwashed in a perforated plastic bag in the vegetable bin, or refrigerate them in a sealed Tupperware container lined with a kitchen towel.
Kohlrabi: Remove the greens from the bulb and plan to use them within a week. The bulb can be put in yet another plastic bag for use within two weeks.
Cucumbers: Be sure to get them into the refrigerator right away. Placed in a sealed plastic bag, they will keep for at least a week.
Sweet Onions: Should be kept in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, but beware of the moisture accumulation that causes them to spoil. Eat them within 2 weeks.


Opportunities for Involvement:
* Share your photos on the Fort Greene CSA Flickr page by sending photos to ryanscott.photography@gmail.com!
* If you have an idea for a great member event, let us know! We are always open to suggestions to make our CSA an integral part of our Fort Greene community.
* If you're web savvy, we can always use help maintaining our website. Have other special skills? Email us at volunteer@fortgreenecsa.org and let us know how you'd like to help out. The CSA is for all of us -- let's make it a fantastic season together.


This Week’s Recipe: Squash Blossoms
**This week, we give you two squash blossoms recipes which you’ll surely have the opportunity to try throughout the season.**


Stewed Squash Blossoms
(recipe from Authentic Mexican by Rick Bayless)
20 good-size, fresh squash blossoms
1/2 medium onion, diced
fresh hot green chiles to taste (roughly 2 jalepeño or serranos) stemmed, seeded, and finely minced
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 medium-large tomato, roasted or boiled, cored, peeled, and chopped
small handful fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons crumbled queso fresco

Clean squash blossoms by removing the stamens from inside the flowers and trimming off rough-looking bases. Rinse well and cut crosswise into 1/2 inch sections.
In a medium-sized skillet over medium heat, fry the onion and chile in vegetable oil until tender (about 5 minutes). Add tomato, flowers, and herbs. Cover and let steam over medium-low heat until the flowers are tender (about 8 minutes). Uncover, season with salt and sprinkle with cheese. Scoop into a small bowl to let cool before serving.


Stuffed Squash Blossoms
(recipe from Maria Alvarez, from Greenmarket's New Farmer Development Project)
Serves 4 as an appetizer

16 squash blossoms
1 cup feta or queso fresco
1 large egg, beaten
2 tablespoons milk, beaten into eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
4 tablespoons olive oil

Gently wash blossoms. Slice open along one side and remove pistils. Place a heaping tablespoon of cheese into each and twist ends to seal. Dip blossoms into egg mixture, coat with flour and set aside. Repeat with remaining blossoms.
Heat oil in heavy skillet. Add blossoms, frying on one side until golden brown. Turn and cook other side. Serve immediately.

Food Justice Action Alert

....This just in from Just Food.... Council Member de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Stringer, and food justice advocates rally in support of groundbreaking resolution to improve access to local, just and sustainbly-produced foods and decrease NYC's ecological "Foodprint" A groundbreaking council resolution was introduced today in the City Council by Bill de Blasio, and calls for a citywide "FoodprintNYC" initiative to create greater access to local, fresh, healthy food, especially in low-income communities as well as city-run institutions. By increasing the availability of local, just and sustainably-produced food, New York City can decrease its ecological "Foodprint" -our food system's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change through the production, processing, packaging, shipping, storage and disposal of food. The resolution could help the city meet its goals of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, while increasing access to local, healthy food to NYC, particularly underserved communities. Join Just Food and other members of the NYC Foodprint Alliance at the press conference tomorrow to rally support for this new food and climate justice resolution! When: Wednesday, July 1, 11:00 AM Where: City Hall Steps Who: Councilmember Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, members of the NYC Foodprint Alliance, other elected officials and over one hundred activists For more information on the press conference, contact: Matthew Wing (CM de Blasio): 212-788-6969/917-601-1572 Carmen Boon (BP Stringer): (212) 669-3882 Meredith Turner (Farm Sanctuary): 646-369-6212 For more information or to join the NYC Foodprint Alliance, contact: Nadia Johnson at Just Food, nadia@justfood.org.

Idealist.org Podcast!

The Fort Greene CSA has been featured on a special podcast, created by CSA member Cambra Moniz-Edwards. Click here to check it out!

Handout for November 5th - Last One!

Here is the handout for our LAST distribution of the 2008 season. This edition features a mushy thank you from your CSA Coordinator as well as two very different pumpkin soup recipes & more!