September 27
Red Kuri winter squash. Squash warts are a great sign, because they're caused by a high sugar content. !!
Farthest North melon mix; each vine produced slightly different melons.
Endive frisee. Looks like lettuce, but strong-flavored enough for either a strong dressing or quick cooking.
This week's harvest:
NEW: Red Kuri winter squash; Farthest North experimental melon; Frisée endive. (See storage notes!)
THE LAST: everything else! Thank you all for a great season!
This includes: chard, Red Core Chantenay carrots, a trimmed Negi (big) green onion, pattypan summer squash, Marketmore slicing cucumbers, True Lemon round cucumbers, White Velvet okra, and a Highlander pepper. Tomatoes: a pint each of Green Zebra stripies; Mountain Merit round red slicers; and San Marzano cooking/paste tomatoes with some orange Toronjina to fill up.
A bunch of cilantro, and a herb bouquet: flowering cilantro, a marigold, and three flavors of basil.
Recipe suggestions:
Endive looks like lettuce but is sturdier and more bitter, halfway between lettuce and radicchio. Description and some recipes.
You can cook a red kuri squash like pumpkin or any orange winter squash. Easiest is sliced and oven-roasted; tropical-flavors soup; or of course pie.
Simple raw grated carrot salad; or fancy steamed dressed carrots with harissa.
The melon: these are an experimental mix optimized for our short melon-growing season. They aren't expected to ripen once harvested, so cut in and see what you got. If too sweet, blender and freeze it (with basil?) as a natural sorbet. If underripe, I treat them as cucumbers. I'm told that underripe ones sometimes turn out well if grilled or oven-roasted, I'll be trying that with the ones so underripe that I didn't pick them.
San Marzano tomatoes, the long teardrop shaped ones, are paste tomatoes: much less watery than most. This means you don't have to cook off the fresh flavor by cooking down a sauce to make it less watery. I'm sure there are many ways to use this, but personally I've never gotten farther than fresh simple pizza -- chop paste tomatoes with a little salt and garlic and olive oil, onto the crust in the hottest oven I can manage, add basil when it comes out. Maybe some mozarella. Maybe I have the mozarella in a salad with the salad tomatoes instead.
Storage notes:
Curing winter squash: you can eat them right away, but if you can put them aside in a dry warm house for a few weeks they will get even better, sweeter and richer-flavored. After that they will keep for months in *cool* dry storage. Details:
"cure indoors for 5–7 days at 80–85°F (27–29°C), in an area with good air ventilation. Storage life is dependent upon good storage conditions. We recommend storage at 55-60°F/12-15°C, 50-70% relative humidity and good ventilation. Repeated exposure to temperatures below 50°F/10°C may cause chilling damage, reducing storage life."
That's from Johnny's Seeds summary of curing winter squash. They think a Red Kuri has four good months with proper storage, which means you could keep this squash to cook on Thanksgiving.
The melon won't sweeten with storage, and can get blander if chilled. Leave it on a counter if you can use it within four days.
Rinse anything outside the big plastic bag before eating. Some crops don't wash well or don't store well when wet, and those will be delivered UNWASHED and OUTSIDE the big plastic bag, possibly in a small plastic bag. Big sturdy things like summer squash will just be loose. Rinse anything outside the big plastic bag before eating.
Everything INSIDE the BIG plastic bag has been washed in at least three changes of water and drip dried.
Basil and cilantro and flowers keep best with their stems in water, like little bouquets, I find. Basil outside the fridge, cilantro in the coolest part of my house or the warmest part of my fridge.
In general: root veg, including carrots, should have their greens taken off promptly, after which the roots like cool dark storage. The greens on our root veg are all edible. All greens like cool humid storage.