Baby Arugula – Super baby size, tender, melt-in-your-mouth! Don’t cook it at this size.
Escarole – Looks like lettuce, but it’s not! It’s escarole, a member of the chicory family and well-loved in Italian cuisine. Quick Tip! The thicker, outer leaves are best cooked. The inner, light-colored leaves and white stem are best eaten raw in a salad. You can get two meals out of these giant heads!
Storage: In airtight storage in the refrigerator. Uses: Cooked or Raw When to use: Within 5 days.
Collards – In the summer, I use all my collards as wraps. They can be blanched ahead of time and kept in the fridge ready to wrap up all types of yummy fillings!
Red Beets – Beets are another two-for-one veg because the beet greens are super delicious! Cook them like spinach. The roots are great roasted or boiled and then sliced in salads or served warm. You can shave or grate them raw in salads. So sweet and tender this time of year!
Specialty Bunching Broccoli – Three cheers for a new veg! The floret AND the whole stem are edible and delicious. Just cut off the very base of the stem and stem until tender. This bunching broccoli is new to our farm crop list this year. We saw it in the seed catalogs this winter and thought about the possibility of harvesting broccoli in the summer for our members! We just couldn’t not grow it. The thing is, it has a funny way of growing that requires picking every few days. New shoots form and mature off the center stalk and it keeps producing as long as we keep picking. So it’s in rotation this week. Some groups will receive it and others will receive it in a future week. Tell us what you think!
Garlic Scapes – This is the top of the garlic plant and it’s a rare delicacy only harvested during a short window in June. We remove this part of the plant to encourage the garlic bulbs to thicken up. You eat the whole scape, but remove the flower bud (the small bulge on the thin end). They can be used in place of garlic in recipes, but they’re also delicious cooked in usual ways – like grilled until tender, roasted in the oven until tender, or thrown into the food processor and made into pesto!
The boxes will be getting fuller and heavier in another week or so as we move into the month of June, the start of our main growing season. In the meantime, we are harvesting more greens for you this week, including our famous spinach, collards and bok choi!
