Planting Vegetables!

April 5^th

 I expected to be sore this morning but surprisingly I felt great.  Lissa and I spent the morning in the first hoop house planting broccoli and cauliflower. This year we will have 4 kinds of cauliflower, cheddar, violetta, snowball, and green mix.  I like to eat cauliflower raw but and excellent way to use it would be as a cauliflower mash.  Seriously try it, it is just as creamy and delicious as regular mashed potatoes.  Here is a great recipe to start with and then you can get creative and add whatever else you like.  If you want to cut the cholesterol or calories you can certainly omit the cheese and cream; use some olive oil and it will be just as good. 

 

Mashed Cauliflower

Serves 6

2 pounds cauliflower, trimmed (try using cheddar cauliflower)

Sea salt and ground pepper (to taste)
1/4 cup whipping cream
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
1/4 cup cream cheese

Cut the cauliflower, including the core, into 1-inch pieces. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt lightly. Add the cauliflower and cook over medium heat until completely tender, 20 minutes to 30 minutes.

Drain cauliflower in a colander. With a bowl or small plate, press on the cauliflower to remove all water. Toss the cauliflower and continue pressing out the water. This step is very important to the texture of the dish.

Transfer the cauliflower to a food processor. Add the cream and puree until completely smooth. If you like a chunkier texture, mash by hand, adding the cream after cauliflower is mashed. Return to pot.

When you are ready to serve, heat over low heat, stirring constantly. Add the butter, parmesan and cream cheese. Stir until incorporated. Season to taste with salt, if necessary. Serve immediately.

After planting the broccoli and cauliflower I gave each plant a good drink of water and moved on to the next project…

The large pots used for last year’s herb garden needed to be cleaned out; I pulled the roots and tilled up the dirt.  I used a large bin to collect all the dead leaves and roots; they will be put in the compost pile to make soil for next year. Having an effective compost system in place is imperative to a good sustainable farm.  John, Lissa, and I, as well as a couple  local restaurants provide food scraps and the farm produces plenty of dead organic material. It is pretty cool to make your own soil.  Our compost pile is nutrient dense and a "locavore" (meaning it eats only locally), which produces the finest soil for the farm.  We will have a wide variety of herbs this year and I am looking forward to cooking with them!  Some of the herbs will start from seed and some will be bought already started. It will still be a couple weeks before herbs can be planted but it will be nice to have the pots ready to go. We will also grow some herbs in the greenhouse as well as outside in one of the small gardens. 

Around 1:00pm it has warmed up enough to go pick up the tomato plants. We all head to Derek’s (John and Lissa’s son) to pick them up.  It was quite a sight seeing 900 tomato plants. We spent some time organizing the flats into types and dividing them up; some would go back to the farm with us and some over to Grant and Christy's farm.  Grant and Christy are John and Lissa's partners in the C.S.A. (Community Supported Agriculture) as well as very good friends.  Together the four have been providing local organic produce to the Leech Lake area for 3 years.