The blueberries and blackberries are here, thanks to the unrelenting heat of the last two weeks.  We will have lots of blues and a few pints of blacks tomorrow at the Marietta Square Farmers Market, 8am-Noon.

We are also bringing a few dozen eggs, fresh heads of pink and white garlic, cucumbers, the last of the lettuces (boo hoo!), Italian round zucchini, pattypan squash, costata romanesca zucchini, zephyr squash, maybe a few bunches of beets and some very pretty zinnias.

Join us at the Market and save a little pocket change for some homemade frozen raviolis, chocolate chip cookies, pesto and fresh baked bread.  Keep your food dollar circulating in your local Georgia economy by buying locally grown food!

The blueberries and blackberries are here, thanks to the unrelenting heat of the last two weeks.  We will have lots of blues and a few pints of blacks tomorrow at the Marietta Square Farmers Market, 8am-Noon.

We are also bringing a few dozen eggs, fresh heads of pink and white garlic, cucumbers, the last of the lettuces (boo hoo!), Italian round zucchini, pattypan squash, costata romanesca zucchini, zephyr squash, maybe a few bunches of beets and some very pretty zinnias.

Join us at the Market and save a little pocket change for some homemade frozen raviolis, chocolate chip cookies, pesto and fresh baked bread.  Keep your food dollar circulating in your local Georgia economy by buying locally grown food!

This is my family's favorite dessert recipe using blueberries. It's easy to mix up and most of the ingredients are commonly used so they are already in the pantry/refrigerator and no one has to make a special trip to the store.

I prepared this dessert last summer when Taste of the South Magazine came to shoot the tomato harvest follow-up article. The recipe and a nice photo are included in the June/July issue on page 66.  There are several great tomato recipes listed on pages 64-65, including Mike's incredible Heirloom Salsa recipe, which you need to have if you want to make the most amazing salsa of your life.  But back to blueberries:

• 2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)
• 1/4 cup plus 1/3 cup sugar, divided
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 large egg, beaten
• 3/4 cup whole buttermilk
• 1/2 cup butter, melted and cooled

1. Preheat oven to 375*. Spray a 9x9" glass casserole dish with nonstick spray.
2. Combine blueberries, 1/4 sugar, water, lemon zest and juice, and cornstarch. Simmer over medium heat until fruit sauce coats the back of a spoon (3-4 minutes). Remove from heat and set aside.
3. In a large bowl, combine flour, remaining 1/3 cup sugar, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Whisk well. Set aside.
4. In a small bowl, combine egg, buttermilk and butter, whisking well.  Add to dry ingredients, folding to combine and being careful not to overmix.
5. Pour batter into prepared pan, smoothing to level batter into corners. Pour fruit and sauce over batter. (If the berries don't sink to the bottom, stir an S shape with a spatula so the berries and the batter mingle a bit.)
6. Bake until a wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean, 30-35 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

What do you do with beets in your CSA share?  A couple of menu ideas pop to mind:

Beet Green Gratin, courtesy of Alton Brown at the Food Network website.

Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper

3/4 cup crumbled crackers (recommended: Ritz crackers

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the mushrooms and garlic and sweat. Add the beet greens and mix well. Remove pan from heat. Season with salt and pepper.

In a separate bowl, combine the egg yolks, ricotta, Parmesan cheese, and salt. Combine everything and put into a lightly oiled 9 by 11-inch baking dish. Top with the crumbled crackers and bake for 30 minutes covered. Uncover and bake for an additional 15 minutes.

*Burns family note:  we substitute chopped Vidalia onion in this recipe instead of using mushrooms. Shallots would also be nice.  

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Roasted Beets:

This is the way we cook and use beets most frequently.  Cut the stems off the beet, leaving about a quarter inch of the stems attached.  Scrub the beets with a soft brush to remove any excess dirt.  Fold over a sheet of aluminum foil and crimp the sides closed, making a foil package.  Put the scrubbed beets into the package and then fold the top over and crimp closed.

Bake on a tray at *350 for 30 minutes (for small beets) and closer to an hour for large beets. They are done when a sharp knife can be inserted with no firm resistance.  Remove them from the foil and using two paper towels, lightly rub the skin and the top stem area until the shiny beet comes out, ready to be eaten either warm with butter, salt and pepper or chilled and added to a summer salad of mixed greens and arugula, goat cheese and toasted walnuts. (A little viniagrette on this is a lovely addition.)

On the experimental food schedule for this week is arugula pesto.  I've read in a couple of places that arugula makes a nice substitute for basil in a homemade pesto sauce, and since I have plenty of arugula and my basil is still really short, I'm going to try it out for an appetizer this week.

Here's my pesto recipe, courtesy of Dave Lieberman at the Food Network.  I toast the pine nuts for 5 minutes or until they are lightly browned and very fragrant.  If you make the entire bow-tie pasta recipe (the pesto is a recipe-inside-a-recipe), you might want to substitute goat cheese for the feta.  The kids like goat cheese better than feta and it's a small concession to make in order to get them to eat pesto pasta.

(Last year, I made several recipes of this pesto and froze it. We enjoyed fresh summer flavor all winter long and everyone acted like it was a real treat.)

We are perhaps 5 days away from picking the very first cherry tomatoes of the year, a Gold Rush currant tomato that we haven't grown before. I might be wrong; they might not be ripe for another week.  But it is looking like the smaller-sized Gold Rush will beat the Matt's Wild Cherry onto the table (or more precisely, into my mouth).

We'll be selling at the Marietta Square Farmers Market on Saturday, 8-12.  Available this week:

Arugula

Lettuces (Loma, Cherokee Red, Magenta, Buttercrunch and Little Gem)

Radishes

Eggs (just a few...the hens went on strike this week when it got hot!)

Yellow Crookneck Squash

Green Zucchini Squash

Bok Choy Cabbage (see recipes in the post below)

We hope to see you there! 

Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Deborah Madison, Broadway Books, 1997.)

3 tablespoons raw peanuts

2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 1/2 pounds bok choy

2 tablespoons peanut oil

4 garlic cloves, minced

4 teaspoons minced ginger

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon cornstarch mixed with 3 tablespoons water or vegetarian/chicken stock

 1.  Fry the peanuts in 2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil until they're golden. Chop with the pepper flakes and a few pinches of salt and set aside.

2.  Slice off the bok choy stems and cut them into 1-inch pieces. Leave the leaves whole. Set the wok over high heat.  Add the 2 tablespoons peanut oil and roll it around the sides. When hot, add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add the bok choy and a few pinches of salt and stir-fry until wilted and glossy.  Add the soy sauce and cornstarch and stir-fry for 1-2 minutes more or until the leaves are shiny and glazed. Add the crushed peanuts, toss and serve.

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Chicken Fried Rice (adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook)

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 cup long grain rice

2 cups chicken stock

2 carrots, sliced 

1/2 onion, chopped

1 cup cooked chicken, chopped/shredded

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 1/2 pounds bok choy (stems sliced and leaves sliced into ribbons)

1/2 teaspoons celery seed

3 eggs, beaten lightly

1.  Combine chicken and soy sauce; set aside.

2.  Over medium-high heat, heat oil in a wok or a large saute pan with a lid and add uncooked rice; stirring frequently, fry rice in hot oil until light brown.  Add chicken stock slowly, then add carrots and onions. Cover and turn heat to medium low. Cook for 8 minutes.

3. Add bok choy stems, chicken and celery seed. Stir well and sample the rice to see if it's tender.  If so, stir in the beaten eggs and stir thoroughly as the eggs cook and bind up some of the rice.  

4. When eggs are almost completely cooked through, add the bok choy leaves and stir fry until the leaves wilt and are evenly distributed throughout the rice.  Remove from heat and serve.

*(Can also add half a can of water chestnuts if you want more crunch. Also can add a half a cup of frozen green peas when the eggs are added. Our family eats this with canned cranberry sauce as a side dish.  We're a little strange. :) ) 

Today was a very successful market sales day at the Marietta Square Farmer's Market and a big thanks to all of you who stopped by, chewed the fat, and took home a few heads of lettuce, some radishes to spice up the salad, or a dozen eggs.  Without your repeat business and the encouragement you give us when you buy our produce, this farming gig would be much less rewarding.

In case you picked up my business card today inside the egg carton and you are checking out the website for the first time, I wanted to steer you to a couple of links on other wibsites that do a much better job of explaining our pastured hens and the eggs they lay. (Actually, I can do a pretty good job of explaining it most days, just not on days when I'm up at 4am to sell at the market!)

The Food Renegade discusses the differences in pastured eggs, cage free eggs, and organic eggs.  Before you pick up another over-priced carton from the grocery store, read these descriptions and you'll be more informed about what you're really buying.

Mother Earth News does a great job in this article showing the nutritional improvements in a pastured egg when compared with any other method of raising hens.All of a sudden, eggs aren't looking like little cholesterol bombs anymore, are they? Vitamin A? Vitamin D? Don't we hear everywhere that we need to be getting more of each of those?  I thought so.....

Ok, just one gratuitous egg photo from the file, just because I love them so much:

We haven't talked about our weekly produce subscriptions here on the farm blog, mostly because we've had such good referrals from the Crabtree Farm website and we didn't think we needed to advertise beyond that space.  As it turns out, we still have space for a few (couple? less than a handful?) memberships for the inaugural season of our CSA program.

Here are some of the details:  when you join this small group of families, you will receive a weekly box of the freshest fruit and vegetables grown here at Burns Best Farm. Pick-up is on-farm in Catoosa County on Tuesdays, 4pm-7pm.  The program will run 10 weeks, starting June 16 and ending August 18, and the cost for 10 weeks is $250.  (Which can be paid in two installments of $125 each, the first due right away and second due at week 6).

If you are interested in joining our little band of farm friends, please hit the "email us" button here on the home page and send us an note.  We'd love to meet you and share our harvest with you all summer long!

Copyright 2009 Burns Best Farm. All content and images belong to us and cannot be used without written permission.

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here.  We'd had a rash of wet weather two weeks ago and then last week, warm and sunny.  So everyone was working 'til dark to get transplants into the rows as well as some direct seeding on beans, basil and some other herbs and flowers. 

The big news last week was that Diana, the broody hen, was successful in hatching out three chicks.  I never did get up the nerve to relocate her to a private pen before the babies hatched out.  I'm new to this, you know.  I heard peeping under her on Saturday afternoon but the chicks didn't emerge for us to look at until Monday afternoon. Even then, we only saw two. The third one didn't show itself until Tuesday, when I was preparing to move mom and babies.  In the time it took me to get the pen ready and distract the other hens from bothering me in the process, one of the babies fell out of the nest and disappeared.  I was crushed!

Check out that wary, mean look in her eye!  She pecked me good when I moved her. But she's been such a good little momma, I forgave her.  One of the chicks looks to be a full-blooded White Rock like the mom, and the other looks like half White Rock/half Aracuana. I hope it's a hen so I can see what color eggs that kind of cross-breed will lay.

  On Thursday, she abandoned the remaining eggs and got her babies out into the world to learn how to scratch and eat.  Since we are in the experimentation mode around here with hatching chicks, I borrrowed an incubator from the Extension office a week earlier and I decided to transfer the abandoned eggs just to see what would hatch. Within 24 hours, two more chicks were waiting on us to admire them Friday morning.  A fifth one hatched on Sunday.

Diana is a very good mom, but the newer chicks aren't strong enough to keep up with mom and their older siblings.  I introduced them to the nest on Sunday night and Diana stood up and pushed them underneath her, just like she keeps the older babies. During the day on Monday, however, the newer babies became separated from her several times and were left by themselves, clinging to each other and chirping for help.  I rescued them three times, only to watch it happen again. So we are letting the babies sleep under their warm momma at night but are keeping them in a box on the porch with food and water until they get stonger and can keep up.

(Can you tell I've been wrapped up in the drama of baby chicks?! This whole experience has been brand new for me, and seeing the instinct this hen shows towards protecting her babies has been incredible to watch.)

Onto other news:  Mike has started to harvest the most beautiful lettuce we have ever grown!  We have four varieties this spring, all of which are new to us: Magenta, Cherokee, Little Gem and Loma.  We have filled a restaurant order already and have some going to a local retail outlet this week.  We took a few to market last weekend as well.

Oh yea....we're going to market in Marietta on Saturdays!  The Marietta Square Farmer's Market officially opened May 2. Our first appearance was the following weekend and then we missed the 16th due to weather.  But last week we were back with eggs, bok choy, tender lettuce and some lovely arugula.   

Here's the Marietta Square Farmer's Market website link.  If you are in the area, please stop by and see us.  We're usually open for sales by 8:00 even though the market doesn't technically open until 9:00am, But like most things in life, the best pickings are available to the early birds! 

Copyright 2009 by Burnsbestfarm.com . All images are ours and cannot be used without written permission.