Editor's note: This file is the complete, unedited collection of CSG newsletters as published in hardcopy for the year 2007 as of August 28. The graphics have been eliminated, but all of the recipes are as published.

AUGUST 28, 2007

RECIPES

Orange Glazed Beets (Contributed by shareholder Edie Stehwein)

1 ½ pounds beets (3 to 4 average size), peeled, quartered, and sliced about ¼ inch thick
1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 teaspoon finely grated orange zest
1 teaspoon pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon saltPlace all ingredients in a large pan, cover, and bring to a low boil.  Simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 12 minutes, or until the beets are tender.  Uncover and boil until the liquid has reduced to a glaze, about 4 minutes more.  These taste good hot, at room temperature, or chilled.

Vegan Miso Pesto (Contributed by shareholder Edie Stehwein)

3 cups fresh basil, rinsed and patted dry (spinach leaves can also be used)
3 garlic cloves
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup pine nuts (or walnuts)
1 tablespoon sweet white MisoPlace all the ingredients in a food processor fitted with a steel blade and blend until smooth. Serve over pasta.

Pasta with Swiss Chard (Recipe Courtesy of Cathy Lowe, Television Food Network)8 ounces penne, rotelle or rigatoni, cooked and drained
1/4 cup pasta cooking water
1 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped or thinly sliced
1 pound Swiss chard, coarsely chopped, stems removed
1/2 cup red or white wine or vegetable stock
1 cup crushed red tomatoes
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts (optional)
Salt and pepper
In a large skillet heat the oil and stir in the onion. Cook for 2 minutes and stir in the garlic. Add the chopped Swiss chard and toss to coat. Pour in the wine or stock and stir to coat. When the chard begins to wilt, stir in the tomatoes, red pepper flakes and
pine nuts. Bring to a simmer and stir in the reserved pasta cooking water. Remember: Do Not over cook the chard. It is ready to serve just after it has wilted. Immediately add the cooked pasta and toss to coat. Serve immediately.

Cucumber Salad Trio (Simply in Season, Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hackman-Wert)
3 cups cucumbers, thinly sliced
½ cup onion, thinly sliced
Salad 1:
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup vinegar
½ tsp celery seed
Mix together in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, cook and stir until sugar is dissolved. Pour over cucumbers and onions. Cover and marinate in refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Keeps several days.
Salad 2:
¼ cup vinegar
2 tbsp oil
½ tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar (optional)
Mix together and add to the cucumbers and onions.

Salad 3:
Place cucumbers and onions in a large bowl and sprinkle with 1 tsp salt. Let stand 1 hour. Drain. Add ¾ cup plain yogurt and
1 tbsp fresh mint or chopped dill weed to the cucumbers and onions.

Sweet and Sour Swiss Chard (Simply in Season, Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hackman-Wert)
1 lb Swiss chard
1 medium onion, sliced
¼ cup dried cranberries or raisins
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp white or cider vinegar
1½ tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
Rinse chard, pat dry and remove stems. Chop stems diagonally into small pieces. Stack leaves, roll up, and slice in I inch strips; keep separate from stems. In a deep frying pan sauté onion in 2 tsp olive oil over medium heat until softened, 5 minutes. Add chard stems and all other ingredients except leaves and cook 8 minutes. Place leaves on top of mixture (do not stir in), cover and cook another 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir, and serve.

Sweet and Sour Eggplant (adapted from The American Vegetarian Cookbook, Marilyn Diamond)
4 medium Japanese eggplants, or 1 large standard eggplant
1 tbsp oil
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 bunch green onion cut in ½ inch lengths
½ cup vegetable broth
2 tbsp ketchup or tomato sauce
¼ cup water
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tsp honey
2 tsp arrowroot (or other thickener) dissolved in 4 tbsp cold water
¼ cup minced cilantro (optional)Cut unpeeled Japanese eggplant in ¼ to ½ inch slices. (If using standard eggplant cut in ½ inch cubes, sprinkle cubes with salt, place in colander, let sit for 20 minutes, rinse and pat dry to remove bitter juices). Assemble remaining ingredients.
Heat wok or small stewpot over medium-high heat. Add oil, garlic, and green onions. Stir-fry 1 minute, then add eggplant and stir-fry for 2 minutes.
Add broth to wok, lower heat to medium, toss vegetables for 30 seconds, cover and steam for 4 minutes. While vegetables are steaming, combine tomato sauce, water, soy sauce, vinegar, and honey in a small bowl.
Uncover wok Raise heat to medium-high, and stir-fry for 1-2 additional minutes, until eggplant is tender. Add sweet-and-sour mixture and toss well to coat. Stir in arrowroot mixture and allow sauce to thicken. Turn out into a warm serving bowl and garnish with cilantro if desired.

Provencal Vegetable Gratin (From Food Network Kitchens, Television Food Network)
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for dish
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
3 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
5 to 6 medium plum tomatoes, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
2 medium zucchini, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
2 medium yellow summer squash, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease a 7 by 11-inch baking dish with olive oil.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large skillet over medium low heat. Add onions, garlic and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, until completely softened and cooked but not browned. Stir in the basil and thyme. Spread on the bottom of the prepared baking dish.
Toss the sliced vegetables with the remaining olive oil and salt, and pepper. With the long side of the baking dish facing you, alternate the sliced vegetables in compact upright rows on top of the onion mixture.
Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake until the vegetables are softened, about 30 to 35 minutes. Uncover and sprinkle with the Parmesan. Continue baking until cheese begins to brown, about 20 minutes or so. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Cooking Tips for Swiss Chard and Other Greens (from Asparagus to Zucchini, Madison Area CSA)
Wash greens thoroughly to remove hidden grit. Be careful not to overcook or they will become mushy. Boil greens for 3-5 minutes, or steam for 8-10 minutes depending on maturity and toughness. Watch for color to brighten. This signals cooking is complete or nearly complete. Cooked greens can be tossed with oil and vinegar, eaten plain, or with butter and seasonings.
Greens can also be used in stir-fry, soups, stews, omelets, quiches, lasagna, and casseroles.

Japanese Braised Eggplant (New Recipes From Moosewood Restaurant)
2 medium eggplants
½ cup dry sherry
1/3 cup tamari soy sauce
1 tbsp molasses
¼ cup vegetable oil
8 oz. tempeh
2 tsp ground fennel seeds
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp ground coriander seeds
1 medium green pepper, diced
4 cups sliced mushrooms
3 tbsp tomato paste
salt to taste
brown rice
chopped scallions
toasted sesame seedsLeaving the stems on, cut the eggplants in half lengthwise. Mix together the sherry, soy sauce, and molasses. Oil a baking pan. Pour the sherry mixture into the pan, place eggplant halves, cut side down, in the pan, cover it tightly, and bake at 350 deg for 45 minutes, until tender.
Brown the cubed tempeh, ½ cup of the onions, 1 tsp of the fennel, and ¼ tsp cayenne in oil for 20 minutes, stirring frequently to avoid burning. In a separate pan sauté the remaining 2 cups of onions, the coriander, and the remaining tsp of fennel until translucent. Add the peppers and mushrooms and sauté another 15 to 20 minutes, until tender.
With a slotted spoon, lift the tempeh and onions from the oil, and stir them into the sautéed vegetables. Stir in the tomato paste and 2 tbsp of the braising liquid from the eggplant baking pan. Salt the filling to taste.
Turn the eggplant halves over in the baking pan. With a fork or spoon, carefully mash the pulp a little and then push it to the sides making a hollow in each half and taking care not to break the skins. Fill each hollow with ¼ of the filling. Cover the pan tightly and bake at 350 deg for 20 minutes, until piping hot.
Serve on a bed of rice, pour some juice from the pan over the eggplant, and sprinkle with chopped scallions and toasted sesame seeds.

JULY 6, 2007

NOTES FROM SMADAR AT THE GARDENHOUSE (908) 362-7486

We would like to send out a very special (albeit belated) welcome to our team of apprentices this year. Anthony has returned for his second year. Meghen has come to us all the way from Wisconsin. Carlie came to us from New York State, via Pittsburgh! Maxine’s family joined the garden when she was 8 and now at 18 she’s spending the season with us. Then there’s Hanna, who joined the garden at the age of 4 has been volunteering every Fri for years and now, at 18, she’s with us 2 days a week. She’s always been a joy to have around and this year we'll have twice the joy. What a unique perspective they have. All of them are dedicated, loving, hardworking people with a terrific spirit. I'd like to thank them on behalf of Judy, Mike, and myself for being such a great team.
I'd also like to thank our greeter coordinators Sheri Raupp and Wendy Miller. The two of them and their team of greeters have really made a difference in the distribution center. If you are able to spend a couple of hours on your pickup day helping, call Wendy for Tuesday’s greeting at 973-726-4955, and Sheri for Friday’s greeting at 908-876-4082.
Thanks to Wayne Miller (no relations to Wendy Miller) for his creative and diligent upkeep of our web site www.csgatgenesisfarm.com. He added a gallery for members to contribute essays, pictures, poems, messages, or anything else that relates to the CSG. Feel free to participate. Upcoming events or special notices get posted on the site as well. There is a gallery of black and white pictures taken by Rob Yaskovic on a hot summer day August 1st of 2006 here at the Garden with a link to a fantastic book for sale of photos from that day. Wayne is looking for someone to organize the recipe section, anyone out there?
The “Welcome to the Garden” gathering on June 2nd was fun and we had quite a turnout. We made great pancakes with our own flour. A special thanks for Dave and Chris for slaving over the hot Colemans. Unfortunately, most of the strawberry plants have been seriously damaged by the deer so for the first time ever, we could not open the P.Y.O. strawberry patch. A lot of effort goes into growing them, and this is a huge disappointment to everyone, but there’s always next year. However you can check out the distribution center for signs on other P.Y.O.s as the season progresses.
Our workshare volunteers have been great on harvest mornings. All those peas! We could not do it without you! If you'd like to join us in the fields on harvest mornings, call the Gardenhouse at 908-362-7486. You might just love it! A community oven, what a great idea! If you’re interested in clay ovens and would like to be involved, call me. We’re still at the brainstorming stage. For members who wish to get involved in other aspects of our CSG, there is a list of working committees and a binder for signup in the distribution center. Talk to us if you have any questions.
Last but not least, I’d like to thank those of you have been keeping up with your share payments, and remind those who have forgotten, that the second payment was due on July 1st. The last and final payment will be due on October 1st. We do not send out bills, so please take care of this if you have not done so yet. Thank you Liz for all the data base work.
Thanks to all of you for being part of our CSG, and supporting Fresh And Local.

ENVISIONING A FUTURE FOR THE MOORE FARM

On March 31, the Garden held a general shareholder meeting in the distribution center. One purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm about different ideas for optimizing the use of Chan Moore’s Silver Lake Road farmhouse, barn and 80-acre property, left to us by Chan. While the estate has not been settled and we do not yet have the deed to this property, it seemed important to begin thinking about this together. It’s clear that Chan’s incredibly generous gift presents great opportunities for our Garden.
Approximately 30 people attended the general meeting, including gardeners and interns, board members, active volunteers and meeting newcomers. We voiced a lot of ideas, and although we did not have the time to explore their pros and cons or even their feasibility, they included: Use the house/garden for a community gathering space; Start a dairy/cheese facility or raise eggs; Do a farmhouse B & B; Found a farm school for future farmers; Have a memorial garden / place to bury ashes; Do a brick fundraiser to raise funds for restoring/maintaining the premises; Use a part of the house for an administrative office; Collaborate with Genesis Farm Learning Center on educational programs; Start a seed saving center; Start a processing kitchen; Start a bakery; Become a model/educational center for appropriate technologies.
Along the lines of starting a bakery, we also discussed the idea of constructing either a brick or clay outdoor oven near the Moore farmhouse. Julie Taormina, a local baker, chef and long-time Garden friend, made a short presentation about ovens and we all sampled her out-of-this-world bread made with Garden grains. Julie is interested in baking more often and making the bread available to Garden members. While there are open questions on how a bakery might operate, a consensus was reached that the oven would be a welcome addition to the property. It could be built by community members, it is not enormously expensive, it would be a nice addition to gatherings at Chan’s farmhouse, and for people who love to bake, it could be the foundation of an incredible bakery.
Since our meeting, the Garden has been gathering a core of people who are interested in planning and implementing the outdoor oven project. If you’d like to be in on the ground floor of this effort, please let us know. The oven project doesn’t preclude working on other good ideas, so if you have a particular interest, passion, or talent in any of the above areas, or some other vision, please talk to Smadar or email me at liz@lifespeed.net. Thanks, Liz Marshall

CARLIE’S CORNER

The following is an excerpt from the first letter that one of our new interns, Carlie, wrote to her friends in April, telling them about her life and experiences at the community-supported garden.
Hello Friends, I have thrilling news! For the next eight months, I will be working on an organic vegetable farm in northwestern New Jersey. I hope to learn as much as I possibly can about this trade - this lifestyle, really - that I believe will be the cornerstone of any sustainable society we choose to enact in this coming time of crisis. I am, as Thoreau put it, determined to know beans. To those of you who don't know how a farm works, or what one looks like, or what it's like to live in the country on your own dime, I want to give you an idea. To those who are familiar with the agrarian life, I hope that my experiences will give you cause to reconsider your own.
I work at the Community Supported Garden at Genesis Farm. The Farm was founded by Dominican nuns in 1980 and the garden was started in 1988. The farm property is 180 acres, plus another 80 acres that was willed to the garden by Chan Moore, a neighbor who died in 2005 and whose house I now live in. The debate rages about what to do with the property; some say grains, some say animals. The only profitable animals gracing the land right now are two cats, Oreo and Snickers (guess what they're supposed to resemble), an old mutt named Rover, and his new friend as of today, a black lab mix called Marley, who we renamed Barley, not to be confused with Carlie. Their tasks mainly involve bringing sudden death to the anti-profit animals in the area: mice, voles, and gophers. The Garden is a demonstration of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a system of produce distribution in which all or most of the harvest on a farm is split among members who pay a fee to receive it on a weekly basis, either for the growing season (May until November) or for the entire year. This system has only been in use in the U.S. since 1984, when it was brought here from Switzerland by a kind man named Jan Vander Tuin.
I'm staying in Chan's old farmhouse with three other interns, one guy and two girls, who range in age from eighteen to twenty-four. On Saturday, I baked bread for the first time in my life! For those of you who have done lithography (printmaking), it's a reminiscent process, but less chemical and less anal. It took about three hours over the course of the day, so naturally, the query arose: is the pleasure worth the pain? We decided that, nay, to the contrary, the pain is pleasure. The interns are into buying communal food and cooking together almost every day, and since I'm an intern, I'm also into it. I've eaten so much organic food in the past five days that my intestines are sending out a search party for the partially hydrogenated oils. Given that it's April, root vegetables from last fall's harvest factor heavily into our diets – besides the leafy greens in the greenhouses, there is little to harvest. Tonight for dinner, we roasted potatoes (sweet and white), beets, carrots, parsnips, celeriac (celery root), onions, and garlic with olive oil and rosemary. With what ease was such sweet fruit cooked! The trials of growing it may require another exclamation.
When I decided to try farming, I mostly received responses ranging from "Cool! . . . . ." to "Boy, that's some hard work. You know how hard you'll have to work, right?" to "You went to Carnegie Mellon for that?" These responses intrigued me. What was I getting myself into that would elicit such a varied reaction? I thought about them. From the sound of it, I was getting myself into something that a) people didn't know enough about to feel confident in describing it as "cool," b) was not only hard work, but hard physical work, distinguishing it from the hard work that most Americans take on, and c) was not worthy of going to school to learn about (if we assume that school equals learning, not earnings). In physics, they would call the space that farming occupies in our collective conscious "a vacuum." The popular reaction to my new plan magnified my eagerness to see and touch the workings of that empty space that is responsible for the production of our food. So, is the work hard? Well, today was my third day of work, from 8am until 6pm. I foresee making it to the end of the week, and, given two days of rest, I think I may be able to ring in the coming week with some enthusiasm. That's the virtue of the workweek, right?
The land itself is hilly and ecologically diverse. In addition to fields and orchards, Genesis Farm has woodlands, swamps, and a pond. Aside from a sparsely traveled, well-paved road dividing it in two, and the occasional chainsaw buzz, when I'm working in the field, it's easy to forget I'm connected to this thing called modern society, which - I can't lie - I kind of want to do. The sun has been on duty despite the forecaster's promise of "unseasonable coldness," and the wind is whipping around, cutting the heat of the sun. I can feel myself breathing in time to the motions of my muscles. Also, I am recovering a sense of smell I didn't notice was missing: wet soil and sun-baked soil, pine needles, cooked beans, violets, dog, grass. Everything has a smell. My sense is less refined yet than Judy's, who identified an entire bed of garlic as potentially molding based on a barely perceptible scent that I feel like I could never learn to notice.
However, that's my new job and my new goal. Learn to smell the mold in the mulched fields of garlic. As Judy, Maxine and I mused over as we covered the planted fava beans with row cover cloth to keep them warm, farming is a body-based education. If you know your mind, so much the better for the orientation of your body, but if you're so certain of your mind that it refuses to meet your body halfway down a difficult path, then your efficiency levels will suffer and the otherwise rewarding work will become drudgery. The mind must yield to the body, because while the mind is versed in facts, the body verses itself in truths. This wisdom rarely finds play in contemporary educational disciplines – where would it? That, to me, smells like mold in the garlic fields. Perhaps for the sake of propriety I should hold off on my praise: it is only my third day on the job. But it seems still less proper to downplay the emotion that arises from pulling artichokes from the ground under a drenching rain, influencing the character of a kiwi tree with pruning shears, and watching the full moon rise over a pond full of bleating frogs, all in the same day. The feeling is life satisfaction of a quality that alludes to longevity, although some may say that nothing's sacred 'til proven by time. It's very late, and I'll leave the poetic waxing to the moon.

Editor's note: end of document.