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Posts Tagged ‘farm’

The Enigmatic Eggplant

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 28, 2010| 6 Comments »

The first CSA haul of the summer and I’m already faced with the unknown: eggplant. I guess because my grandfather never grew eggplants, I hardly ever ate them and certainly never had to figure out how to cook them.

Indulging my tendency to try things that are probably a bit too complicated, I settled on making Eggplant Parmesan, using a recipe from Martha Stewart.

That’s right. Martha Stewart.

It turned out delicious, even if it took the better part of two hours to make. I was unable to capture its deliciousness in a photograph, however; it’s one of those dishes that just looks like a big watery blob on the screen.

Next week I’m hoping for tomatoes, because juicy homegrown tomatoes have to be nature’s gift to us for putting up with heat like this.

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CSA time draws near

Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 25, 2010| 9 Comments »

OK, I know I sound like a shill, but you should totally buy a share in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program this summer.

I had the best time last year with my weekly pickups from Dennison’s Family Farm in Elora, Tenn. It really did turn into my own version of Iron Chef, having to work with whatever ingredients showed up in the box each week. And since there are few things scarier for my husband to hear than the statement “I made something new for dinner,” it’s somewhat of a miracle that he had a blast with it, too.

It’s a lesson in the natural cycle of crops for those who aren’t used to the whims of Mother Nature. For example, last year’s rains made for a very short corn crop, so I didn’t get nearly the amount of corn I had expected, but I got tons of tomatoes, chard and peppers of all varieties. And strawberries. Not those tasteless baby-fist-sized strawberries you get at the grocery store, but juicy, delectable berries, so many that you can’t eat them all and will be forced to make the best ice cream ever with them. Darn the luck.

Some folks tell me that they just prefer to go to the farmer’s market, which is cool if you like rolling out of bed before 9 a.m. on Saturdays. Which, truthfully, I have been known to do. But what I find myself not doing at the farmer’s market is buying something I’m unfamiliar with, or buying so much of something that I have enough to freeze for later. (I’ve got two more servings of zucchini/onion/garlic soup base in the freezer, and I just ran out of frozen bell pepper slices in January.) Even if you’re not going to get into canning, you can still have a little taste of summer when it’s 30 degrees outside.

Seriously, it was the best summer food-wise that I’ve had since that summer in the early 1980s when my grandfather and I grew a huge patch of watermelons and I ate my weight in fresh tomatoes.

Head to Dennison’s page on LocalHarvest for details on its 10-week program, or search for a CSA closer to you.

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As Pictured Below: An Unbouncy Tigger

Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , on August 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

T-I-double-guh-err, that spells Tigger

This fragrant beauty was packed in the latest CSA box. The Tigger melon is an Armenian heirloom variety, and is sweeter than any melon I’ve ever tasted. It’s about the size of a softball, with the consistency and flavor of a cantaloupe.

It was almost too pretty to eat. But I persevered.

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As Pictured Below: Seedy Discovery

Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2009| 2 Comments »

seeds1

During my most recent CSA adventure, I made stuffed eight-ball squash. Don’t tell the generations of ancestors before me who were Southern farmers, but I still just don’t like squash.

I did like the seeds, however, roasted at 350 degrees with a little olive oil and salt. They were crunchy and delicious, plus they looked awfully nice in my favorite green bowls.

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As Pictured Below: Green Tomato Fail

Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , on July 7, 2009| 5 Comments »

salsa

The green tomatoes from my weekly CSA delivery almost redeemed themselves in what I thought would be a snazzy salsa recipe, but no. Can somebody please explain the South’s obsession with these things?

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This summer is going to be delicious

Posted in CSA, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2009| 2 Comments »

 

CSA

Pictured above is the haul from my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) delivery from Dennison’s Family Farm in Elora, Tennessee. Even after splitting it with a friend (save for the strawberries, which were way too ripe to last the weekend), it’s quite a collection of freshness.

Enlisting in a CSA is a little like buying a share in a farm, only you don’t have to keep the deer out of the cornfield or harvest anything (although I must point out that digging up potatoes may be the dirtiest fun you’ll ever have before dark). Every Friday for 10 weeks, I get to pick up a big box of just-picked produce (whatever is ripe), split the goods, and head home for what I have dubbed Iron Chef Huntsville.

I figure it’ll be a weekly summer adventure. Before the season is over, we’ll have, among many other things, watermelon, tomatoes, squash, corn, potatoes, beans, peas, and something called a Cape gooseberry.

Last weekend, we more or less lived off of fresh greens (Swiss chard and Yukina savoy), cherry tomatoes and cucumbers.

Also, for the first time ever, I had to cook a green tomato. My grandparents had a small farm, so growing up I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of tomatoes. Red, ripe, juicy, delicious tomatoes. The whole fried green tomato thing never made any sense to me. Who in their right mind would pluck a tomato from the vine before it ripened? Who would batter and fry this unripened fruit instead of waiting to make it the key ingredient in a BLT?

My reaction upon tasting fried green tomatoes for the first time a few years ago: meh. I would have rather waited for a sandwich.

I’ve never been a fan of frying things, despite being an occasional fan OF fried things. So I found a reasonably professional-looking recipe for baked green tomatoes, scaled it down and sliced and coated my way to an OK side dish.

Meh. I still would have rather waited for a sandwich.

The strawberries were lagniappe, as the folks running the farm were under the impression that there would be no more strawberries after mid-June. These bonus berries were far too delicate to hang on until Monday, when I delivered half the goods to my fellow shareholder (she got the cabbage and eight-ball squash – not exactly evensies,  but we’ll work it out). These went into a batch of strawberry ice cream, a concoction that turned out to be so rich and delicious that it actually saved my oft-criticized ice cream maker from the Goodwill box.

If you have any interest in making ice cream, get Ben & Jerry’s recipe book. Just using the one recipe has convinced me to toss the other two ice cream recipe collections I have and devote my empty calorie expenditures to homemade ice cream, at least for the summer. The tasty, tasty summer.

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Outrunning a thousand things

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2009| 2 Comments »

Speaking to a friend from Texas today, I noted that Southern families, or maybe just farming families in general, seem to have tragedies woven into their histories, generation after generation. This probably isn’t a fair assessment – Northerners have plenty of dysfunction, too, no? – but it’s what I know.

Southerners can be shockingly straightforward about the past. An uncle dies, you hear the story of how he accidentally shot another man while hunting in his youth, and barely escaped jail time. Again and again you hear about the aunt who died decades too young because a pompous doctor refused to perform a life-saving hysterectomy. You learn about an old family friend who lost his hearing and hand to a careless dynamite accident.

Cancer. Alcoholism. Diabetes. Car accidents. House fires. Thwarted love. Mental illness. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. There are a thousand things that can go wrong, and a thousand things that do go wrong.

When things go right, there’s not so much story, but isn’t that the story that should be told?

My brother, raised by a father whose own father abandoned him before he was even born, a man whose love for us in the end couldn’t overcome what he had missed growing up, has been an unbelievably good father to his two daughters. He may be a natural, but I suspect he is purposely railing against the past.

I’m married to the sort of man that my mom deserved, a man who actually wants to be married to me, and isn’t just filling the role that society dealt him.

Having spent my life outrunning dozens of potential unhappy endings, it always shocks me a little to think that my brother and I may actually be OK, that we’ll stay happily married to our respective spouses, that he’ll always be the guy who really deserves the No. 1 Dad coffee cup, that we’ll pursue careers we don’t despise and maintain hobbies that we love.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop running. But the idea that I might win lets me catch a breath every now and then.

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Goats of Wrath

Posted in Photographs, tagged , , , , , , on October 15, 2008| 3 Comments »


I don’t have a thing for goats. Really. The photo at the top of this blog just struck me as a cool image, a unique moment in time.

The husband and I had just finished making our way through a north Alabama corn maze (an especially bad idea, given that I grew up spending summers on a Mississippi farm and knew how miserable a cornfield was in August). Making our way back to the car, we stopped at the advertised “goat walk,” and this is what we found. A lone goat on an elevated walkway. He wasn’t picking stocks or diving into a plastic pool. He was just walking. On the goat walk.

When I was about 2 years old, I’m told, I developed a terrific fear of goats. I got my signals crossed with the “Billy Goats Gruff” fairy tale and thought that goats were the bad guys. This may or may not have had anything to do with my grandfather, whose story embellishments were legendary.

At any rate, my fear of goats led me to pull my feet up anytime I sat down, proclaiming that the billy goats were going to get me. This lasted until my dad took me to the nearest petting zoo and introduced me to the goats, decidedly non-scary furry creatures. My phobia was cured.

So goats and I go back a long way.

The goat on the goat walk seemed a little embarrassed, like he knew how ridiculous the whole contraption really was, how futile it was to be part of a rural circus put on for city folk. I felt a little embarrassed for him, too.

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