This week your basket contains: spring onions, snow peas (half shares), Swiss chard (full shares), lettuce, zucchini, broccoli or Asian broccoli, new potatoes, CELERY, cucumbers, and basil.

Thank you to all of you who have been sending us egg cartons.  At this point we have a sufficient supply, and it is becoming a bit of a storage issue for us.  For the time being, please don’t send us any more.  If/when we start running low again, we will let you know.

We’ve been experimenting with our planting dates for celery.  This spring we wanted to try an early outdoor planting but, as you may remember, spring was rather wet so we had to transplant the early seeding in a hoop house.  It seems to have worked very well!  We intentionally left a lot of leaf on the celery while we were harvesting as they are nice to use as an herb.  It is very similar to lovage or Italian parsley.  We eventually did get celery outside, and have high hopes for a good fall harvest from that seeding.  The recipe below is large, and could easily be halved.

CREAM OF CELERY SOUP

3 tablespoons butter

1 ¹⁄₂ lbs celery ribs, sliced

2 large onions, chopped

3 cloves garlic, chopped

3 tablespoons flour

6 cups chicken broth (reduced sodium)

1 bay leaf

1 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon lemon juice

3 -4 dashes hot sauce

salt

white pepper

celery leaves (for garnish)

In a large sauce pan, melt butter, add celery, onions, and garlic. Cook over medium low heat until soft. Add flour and cook 1-2 minutes over low heat. Add chicken broth and bay leaf, bring to a boil reduce heat, cover and simmer 30 minutes. Remove bay leaf, puree (in small batches) in a blender or processor. Add cream, lemon juice, hot sauce, salt and pepper. Reheat and simmer 5 minutes. Garnish with celery leaves. Adapted from Geniuskitchen.com

Our new potatoes continue to produce well, and we have been enjoying them in many ways.  The recipe below is one of our favorite ways to use them. 

POTATO SALAD FROM PERIGORD

1 1/2 lbs. potatoes, unpeeled

1 garlic clove, cut

1 onion, sliced

2 Tbsp. chopped sour gherkin

1 Tbsp. capers, drained

1 Tbsp. chopped parsley

2 tsp. chopped chives

1 tsp. chopped tarragon

salt and pepper

2 eggs, hard boiled

3 Tbsp. vinegar

1/4 c. olive oil, or to taste

To make a Gribache sauce:  mash the egg yolk into a puree with the vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.  Incorporate the olive oil (or a mix of walnut and peanut oils), using enough to suit your taste. Boil or steam potatoes until tender.  Run under cold water to cool.  Cut into thick slices and keep warm.   Rub the inside of a salad bowl with the cut garlic clove.  Put the potatoes into the bowl with the onion, gherkin, capers, parsley, chives and tarragon, season with salt and pepper.  Pour the sauce over the salad and mix well.  Garnish with chopped egg white.  Serve warm or cold. (The gherkin and capers can be omitted.   Olives can be substituted.  Tarragon is optional and cilantro would work well).  Adapted from Salads by the editors of Time-Life Books

Last week I printed statements for you, but they never got into your baskets.  I tried an experiment and had our accounting software send out statements to all Tuesday subscribers.  It was less than an unmitigated success (my apologies to everyone who received multiple copies).  In any case, I have added the paper statements this week and will most likely only rely on the paper version in the future.  As I’ve said before, paper and ink are technologies that have worked well for millennia!