August 18, 2008. Week #11.

In Your Box This Week:
1. Sweet Corn-A baker’s dozen for everybody! It will store in your fridge for a few days, but the quicker you eat it the better it will taste! These are the 2nds, meaning the runts and ones that didn’t get pollinated all the way. But they still taste good!
2. Tomatoes-We have decided to pick the ones that are not quite ripe on delivery day, thinking that they can ripen on your counter throughout the week instead of getting too ripe for us to deliver to you next week. Store uncovered on the counter.
3. Rat Tail Radish-now, don’t judge by the name! This is a variety of radish grown for the seed pod, which tastes like radish roots and can be used raw or cooked/sautéed as you would the root.
4. Green & Yellow Beans-2 pounds this week, but some are big so take a look, taste them, and pick through as you see fit.
5. Kohlrabi-Eat the leaves like kale, eat the ball raw or cooked.
6. Hot Pepper-the plants are heavy with peppers, so we are picking some green (milder) and leaving some to get red (hotter).
7. Sweet Peppers-yellow, green, and purple. We only grow one kind of hot pepper with a distinctive long skinny shape, so you can always easily tell the sweets from the hots. Enjoy these raw or cooked!
8. Zucchini-Eat them raw, sautéed, baked, fried, etc.
9. Cucumber-a couple of them may be bitter. Take a test bite and then just peel off the skin if it is bitter, the inner part should be fine.
10. Onions-the continued thinnings of our storage onions.
11. Rosemary-store it in a bag in the fridge for using fresh, or hang upside down to dry in a shady place with air movement.
12. Arugula-this will need at least 2 weeks to re-grow again in this hot weather.
13. Carrots-Try eating the carrot leaves, but the orange roots will store much longer if you cut off the greens first. (Store both in a plastic bag.)
14. Beets-you can eat the nutritious greens & the root, but like carrots and turnips, the leaves will last longer if you cut them off the root and store in plastic.
15. Cuke-nuts-they look like mini-watermelons & taste like a cucumber starburst. These are one of our specialties, rarely grown & almost extinct.
16. Cabbage-The 3rd & final cabbage! Try it lightly boiled with butter, salt, & pepper.
17. Eggplant-the gourmet & rarely bitter Rosa Bianca variety. Not enough for everybody yet, so we will give out what we have and keep track so it stays equal.
18. Hakurei Turnips-the leaves look better than the roots. We’ll bring these to Minneapolis and have them as an optional extra. If you are in Anoka County and want some, let us know and we’ll give you next week’s harvest.

Natalie is our working member who helps with the harvest every Monday. This week her husband Robbie joined us as well, and they are pictured with our little Rosa Bianca Eggplant friend. I thought it looked like a sweet old german woman from a fairy tale. One member said it looked more like a skateboarding teenage boy, and another said it is Severus Snape from Harry Potter.