Share 16 - week of August 30th

In the share this week:

1 lb mixed tomatoes

1 bunch green onions

1 bunch cilantro

1 medium head garlic

2 summer squash

1 lb green beans

1 pint aji rico, poblano, or jalapeno peppers

1 sweet italian pepper

Thoughts from Farmer Anna:

It's salsa time! We have the rare convergence of tomatoes and peppers with cilantro in the share this week. Add garlic and onions from previous weeks and you'll have a seriously tasty salsa in the works. We love to make a roasted salsa around here and it would be great with your tomatoes, sweet pepper, some amount of the hotter peppers, onion and garlic, with cilantro stirred in after blending. Here's a recipe idea for inspiration:

www.onceuponachef.com

TESTED & PERFECTED RECIPE –  This restaurant-style salsa combines roasted tomatoes, onions, garlic and chile peppers with fresh cilantro and lime.

The aji rico peppers are new this year and I'm impressed by their production and flavor. We only planted about 20 ft of these little guys, but they have put off lots of fruits! The Tuesday and Thursday shares are getting these this week and we should be able to give them to Wednesday/Saturday shares next week. These peppers taste similar to a bell pepper with a good kick of heat (about half as much as a jalapeno). They would be an excellent addition to your roasted salsa, just add as many as you think you can handle. They would also be great blistered like shishitos or stuffed with cheese like a jalapeno popper. Or you could preserve them in vinegar and make this Puerto Rican style hot sauce:

www.chilipeppermadness.com

This Puerto Rican hot sauce recipe, called Pique, is a national staple, with a different version for every household.

We're on week 3 of green beans, and it's possible they'll still be on next week before they are done for the season, so if you are tired of cooking them you could make dilly beans with this week's batch. Actually, we may have dill in next week's share so maybe you should hold off until then. Or just start pickling the beans this week and add the dill in when you get it.

www.thekitchn.com

My grandmother kept a tidy little vegetable garden outside her New England home. While she did a decent job of growing squash, cucumbers, and some tomatoes, her best results always came out of her snap bean plants. This also meant my annual August trips to visit her were filled by snapping beans on her porch (a job reserved strictly for grandchildren) and putting jars upon jars of canned green beans in her cellar.

I'm going to leave you this week with a view of our happy little sunflower field. Our summer cover crop mix included sunflowers and they are peaking this week. These flowers lift our spirits every time we glance over that direction and I'm going to be sad to have to mow them down later this week, but we need to make sure the other crops in the mix don't go to seed. All of the awesome biomass from these cover crops will be returned to the soil and mixed in before we plant our overwintering onions in late October.

Have a great week everyone!