August 9
Red amaranth. Cook like the green-pink amaranth, or use fresh as a garnish.
Molokhia greens (all tender tips)
Magenta Spreen tips.
This week's harvest:
NEW: Enough Cucumbers for everyone. The variety is Marketmore, a classic slicer.
Genovese basil, tenderer than the Nufar basil we've had so far.
Red amaranth, same vegetable, different color.
ONGOING: Magenta Spreen and Molokhia greens, both cut as tips, so very tender. I've been cooking them stems and all.
Chard.
Tomatoes, the bigger ones starting to ripen.
Green onions; these are a variety valued for growing big without getting spherical, so you can treat them as onions or scallions.
Carrots; these are Coral, a quick, sweet, fragile, snacking carrot.
Beets, small, various colored. Beet greens are the same as small chard, cooking-wise.
Rond de Nice summer squash.
White Velvet okra.
Kitchen posy, or edible bouquet: as a rule the petals are the good part, the centers are lumpy and tough. Basil is in the bouquet too.
The edible bouquets; everything that travels better if the cut end is standing in water.
The white lacy stuff is blooming cilantro. The flowers are edible. The bright green seeds on it are unripe coriander. I think they're delicious.
The other flowers are blue cornflowers, bright orange marigolds, and calendula with pale fronts and pink backs. Edible petals, all.
Basil is also in the flower bunch because it stays so much fresher this way.
Storage notes:
Washed and unwashed: Some crops don't wash well or don't store well when wet, and those will be delivered OUTSIDE the big plastic bag, possibly in a small plastic bag. Big sturdy things like summer squash will just be loose. Rinse before eating.
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.
Everything INSIDE the BIG plastic bag has been washed in at least three changes of water and drip dried.
In general: root veg, including carrots, should have their greens taken off, after which the roots like cool dark storage. The greens on our root veg are all edible. Greens like cool humid storage.
Recipe suggestions:
Discussion of magenta spreen (summary: treat like spinach. If you read Spanish, there are a lot of recipes for this as a type of quelites.)
Quick stirfry of amaranth greens (reds? pinks?)
I am proud of keeping the big green onions so healthy that they stay green to the tips. I fill the greens with narrow slices of cheese and pan-fry them as appetizers, basically jalapeno poppers. Pin open ends shut with a toothpick to keep the cheese in, or stopper them with a cherry tomato half.
Okra croutons. I don't even bread them, personally; slice thin crosswise to see the star-shape, fry well on one side to get the flavor but leave the bright green of the other side for decoration.
For molokhia see the Recipes from July 26
Getting ripe for next week:
The beans are coming! So many blossoms on several kinds of snap beans. Maybe next week?
Almost all the summer crops, tomatoes squash cucumbers, are producing now, so we're just looking for plenty of what we've got. There are some other varieties coming along, but the same crops. I'm babying lettuces along and the occasional cool week helps a *lot*. We have pepper plants with blooms and even tiny immature peppers on them, but they're still a ways off.