Dear Members,
As a small token of our thanks for your support this first season, and to help you celebrate and feed extra friends and family, we wanted to invite you to take extra in your share this week. Take what you need & bring an extra bag!
THIS WEEKS HARVEST:
Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins, Delicata Squash, Butterscotch Baby Butternuts, Yukon Gold Potatoes, Cured Yellow & Cabernet Onions, Leeks, Fennel, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Murdoch Cabbage, Purple Top Turnips, Loose Mixed Beets, Celery Root, Rainbow Carrots, Dino Kale, Rainbow Chard, Mustards & Arugula Salad Mix, Baby Leaf Spinach, Red Butter & Rouxai Oakleaf Head Lettuces
U-PICK in the GARDEN:
Shishito and Black Hungarian Frying Peppers
Padrones & Jalapeños
Herbs: Lemongrass, Lemonbalm,Lemon Verbena, Anise Hyssop, Sorrel,Thyme, Sage, Oregano, Onion Chives, Garlic Chives, Tarragon, French Culinary Lavender Chocolate Mint, Julep Mint, and Peppermint, late Fall flowers
THANKSGIVING BAKED GOODS & PIE RECIPE:
We have two talented baker friends taking small batch orders for sweet and savory Thanksgiving goodies to adorn your tables.
Gaby, who has been baking us the bread we've been selling here this year is taking orders for Thanksgiving Pies. Gluten free crusts are available. Order by TODAY! (the 17th) for pick-up on the 22nd. To order, visit Gaby's website. The pumpkin pie will be made from our Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins.
Additionally, our friend Tosha Callahan, who baked for the French Laundry once-upon-a-time, is taking orders for cakes, tarts, cookies and dinner roles here. Order by Nov. 19th.
If you're you're going to DIY your pumpkin pie, below is Kayta's go-to pumpkin pie recipe. We will be distributing the Winter Luxury pie pumpkin this week for this recipe.
Kayta's Pumpkin Pie Recipe:
Flaky Tart Dough:
1/2 tsp salt
75 ml water, about 1/3 cup, very cold
227 g all purpose flour, about 1 and 3/4 cup
150 g unsalted butter, 1 stick plus 2.5 tablespoons , very cold
In a small bowl, add the salt to the water and stir to dissolve. Keep very cold until ready to use. Put the flour in the food processor bowl. Cut the butter into 1-inch pieces and scatter the pieces over the flour. Pulse briefly until the mixture forms large crumbs and some of the butter is still in pieces the size of peas. Add the water-and-salt mixture and pulse for several seconds until the dough begins to come together in a ball but is not completely smooth. You should still be able to see some butter chunks. On a lightly floured work surface, shape the dough into a ball, then flatten to a disk 1 inch thick. Wrap well in plastic wrap and chill for at least 2 hours or for up to overnight.
Or you can make the dough by hand, which is what I do. Cut the cold butter into pea sized chunks and mix into the flour and salt mixture. With your fingers, squeeze the butter chunks so that they flatten into the flour. Add the water gradually, pressing and kneading the dough as you go, until all of the flour has been moistened and is able to be formed into a ball. I usually use slightly more water than the recipe calls for. Make the dough into a ball and then flatten into a disc and refrigerate until you are ready to roll it out. Once the crust has been rolled out and placed in your pie pan, refrigerate or freeze it until right before you put it in the oven.
Pie Filling:
1 3/4 cup baked Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin or squash
1/2-3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 heaping tsp. ground ginger
2 eggs
1 cup cream
1/2 cup milk (feel free to adjust the ratio of cream to milk, or substitute coconut milk for all of it!)
Mix the sugar, salt, and spices into the pumpkin. Then mix in the eggs, milk, and cream, and whisk until smooth.
Pour the pie filling into your chilled, raw pie crust, and bake at 400* until only an inch in the center of the pie remains liquid and the crust is golden brown. Let set before eating.
FARMER'S LOG:
Kayta and I grew up in the suburbs. Like all Americans, we encountered those odd, ubiquitous expressions speckled throughout out our vernacular — “cooped up”, “chomping at the bit”, “pigging out”, “getting hitched”, etc. It wasn’t until we started farming that we, one-by-one, realized the roots of these keen and often viscerally poetic sayings in agriculture and animal husbandry. If you’ve ever forgotten to let your chickens out until well into the day, you know what we mean.
Similarly, it wasn’t until we started farming that we began to understand — like really understand — the Thanksgiving holiday.
The Fall is a magical time of year in the temperate world. It is a season of unimaginable bounty. The plants of forest and field have spent all spring and summer harnessing the sun’s energy into fruits and seeds and roots and we have harvested them. In the fall the root cellar is full, the larder is full, the granary is full; the land burst forth at it’s seems and we gathered the overflow.
The farmer, sitting at home with his feet up next to the fire, is keenly aware of the bounty in the root cellar below. He feels a giddy contentment in this — but no pride. He realizes how little he did to create it all. Sure, he worked hard all summer— mostly moving things hither and thither. It was others, present now and before, and life itself, that filled those fields and larders. It was others who laid the roof over his head and dug the cellar. Others who forged his tools and taught him how to use them. Others who saved the seeds and taught others, who taught others, who taught others, who taught him how to care for them. And who or what made those seeds sprout? Not he.
For all this, there is nothing to give but thanks.
We’d like to take a moment to give thanks those who made what bounty we've enjoyed this year possible.
First, to our parents: Bob and Kathy Brady out in Edwardsville, IL and Carl and Martha Plescia down in Sunnyvale, CA. If it wasn’t for their unending love, hard work, and generosity Kayta and I would never, among other things, have been in a situation to start this farm or pull off the 2017 season.
To our landmates and colleagues at Green Valley Farm + Mill, Temra and Jeremy Fisher, Aubrie Maze and Scott Kelley, Jeff Mendelsohn, and Josiah Raison Cain. Thank you for, as our neighbor and member Max once put it, “dreaming big.” You’ve dreamed up a place where a small farm can take root. You could be doing a lot of other things on this land, some that might make your lives easier, but your dream isn’t centered around your own ease. That is a brave and beautiful thing.
To our farming mentors and the farming community in Sonoma County (too numerous to name here) without whom we would not know up from down, too soon from too late, backhoe from stirrup hoe. You make the long-days shorter in solidarity and in much practical wisdom.
To our friends who came through the farm this season to help skin our greenhouses, seed, transplant, hoe and harvest with us. It means so much to us and you’re many hands have made light work when we needed it the most.
And finally to you, our members. Whatever bounty we’ve enjoyed this year is because of you. Your trust and support paid for the seeds, the compost, the irrigation tape, the tomato trellising twine, and our breakfast cereal. You harvested our potatoes, our corn, and our squash. You took a risk on a pair of young farmers following a dream and showed up every week with words of encouragement, brownies, smiles, and cute little doodles to put on the chalk board. You pickled cucumbers for us when we couldn’t pickle them ourselves.
You reminded us day after day, week after week, that real, life-sustaining bounty comes from others... from a community.
Thank you.
