In the share this week:
1 bunch beets
1 bunch carrots
1 pint cherry tomatoes
2 eggplant
2 bell peppers
1 bunch sweet basil
Specialty pepper mix (banana, poblano and jalapeno peppers)
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
It's pepper time this week! The bell peppers are coming on strong and starting to ripen quickly with the hot weather. We've been harvesting the green, red and yellow peppers pictured above and have some purple bells coming as well (although they are a bit smaller generally). I really love sweet peppers and we use them in so many things. They are frequently sauteed with onions for burrito or taco toppings, and they also find their way into lots of soups, curries, stir-fries and vegetable fritters. Oh and pasta sauce! This seems like a great way to use both your peppers and your eggplant this week:
The specialty peppers in your share this week include a mix of banana, poblano and jalapeno peppers. If you want to jazz up the pasta sauce above you could throw in the banana peppers and maybe one of the jalapenos. Alternatively, we love to pickle the banana and jalapeno peppers and then eat them on tacos (did I mention that we love tacos here?) or sandwiches or nachos. We do a simple quick pickle like this:
I would just slice both your banana and jalapeno peppers and combine them in the pickling liquid. The heat of the jalapenos is really dampened by pickling and the flavor combo of having those together is quite tasty! If you are sauteeing your bell peppers for tacos, you could slice up the poblano and add that in as well. Poblanos have a mild heat and a nice thin skin. They are also great roasted or blistered and would probably be quite good in that pasta sauce too.
This new planting of carrots is looking awesome so far! These are some big beefy carrots for mid-summer. With all of the rain we've had over the past few weeks they have really sized up. We spent a lot of hours in early June hand-weeding these babies so I'm happy to see that our hard work paid off :) Carrots and beets are a natural pairing and if you want to keep it simple, maybe you could roast them together on one of these rainy days:
Cherry tomatoes are still producing like crazy this week, while the big tomatoes are slowing down just a bit. We'll definitely have many more weeks of tomatoes, so don't worry about that! We just had lots of other awesome veggies this week. On the farm we are busy getting lots of fall crops planted - carrots, napa cabbage, radicchio, rutabaga, sugar snap peas, and more! It's our last big push of planting for the year and it always feels good in mid-September when we can relax just a bit :)
Hope you all have a great week!