Week 6 and time is flying...

Hi everyone,

Week 6 is here, and we're already at the end of July! I can't really believe it... I feel like I've missed huge chunks of the summer, even though I've been working long days outside everyday since the beginning of May. You'd think the summer would seem longer than usual when so much gets crammed into every single day. But things are going well. The bags are nice and heavy this week as the full summer bounty is coming on now. Generally, most of the crops are producing very well.
Here's what you have:
Salad mix
Summer Squash
Green & Yellow Beans
Sugar Snap Peas
Carrots
Swiss Chard
Scallions
Tomatoes
Cucumbers

So the meal possibilities are pretty much endless at this point. Despite that, I've been mostly eating tomato sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Now that the tomatoes are finally here, I can't get enough of them! I can hardly imagine something more satisfying than a toasted slice of my molasses oat bread with mayonaise, a fat slice of a Striped German tomato (the rainbow-colored ones) and some salt and pepper on top. It's heavenly!

So feel free to email me or post to the blog any recipes that you'd like to share. And if you find you can't eat everything, try freezing some of it. Beans, Peas, and Summer Squash all freeze very well and can be a welcome addition to a winter meal in soups, pasta sauce, casseroles, whatever. A tip I learned last year to help me remember what I have in my freezer upstairs and my chest freezer in the basement, I keep a list on the fridge of what I have frozen and stashed away. Whenever I use something up, I cross it off the list. It's very handy if you're like me and if it's out of sight, it's out of mind.

Peas and Beans are usually better blanched (submerged in boiling water for a minute or so to help slow the enzymes that break food down and cause it to spoil). My cookbook says to blanch squash, too, but I find that it freezes very well without that extra step by just slicing it and freezing it on a cookie sheet and then putting the frozen slices in a zip-lock bag. I'm definitely still learning about how to preserve food (freezing, canning, drying) and if any of you have any tips or methods to share, I for one would love to hear them. Here are two links to a blog and a website about how to freeze vegetables and other preservation techniques:
http://annieskitchengarden.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-16-2009-blanching-and-freezing.html

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/freeze.html

Hope you all are enjoying your summers to the fullest! They fly by too quickly...
All the best,
Sarah VanNostrand for Lucky Moon Farm