Red Wagon Farm

Batch Roasting Vegetables

Posted on November 3, 2022 by mo

There are endless ways to use roasted vegetables. I like to make a weekly big batch of roasted vegetables, especially in the winter, to be able to quickly create several healthy, vegetable dense meals all week and just cook once!

Once your vegetables are cooked you can store them in the refrigerator for a week pull out what you need.

You might feel like a nice hearty salad, easy to do once the vegetables are already cooked.

Or add roasted vegetables to any polenta or pasta dish. Maybe make a roasted vegetable grilled cheese and sub the roasted vegetables for kale.

Sometimes I am cleaning out the refrigerator and need to use up droopy vegetables and other times I am trying to make room because I’m picking my CSA share soon. This week I had some turnips, fennel, delicata squash and Romanesco to use up before my pickup. So this is what I used this week.

To roast vegetables you will want to wash your vegetables and peel them if you like. Then cut them up about the same size so they cook evenly and drizzled some olive oil and salt and pepper and roasted them for about 25 minutes in a 425F oven. After 25 minutes stick a knife in them and see if they are done or if they need more time.

I like to keep my vegetables segregated so if one variety gets done before another I can take it out and let the others finish cooking. Today everything was done at the same time.

While the oven was hot I decided to roast some kale too. I don’t know if I had ever roasted kale before, but, why not? The tray was dirty and the oven was hot.

My absolute favorite breakfast and lunch is savory oatmeal. I make enough oatmeal for the week and warm up enough for a meal and add whatever vegetable odds and ends I have. I like to top it with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and cheese. The olive oil and pepper and cheese take oatmeal over the top.

Having a stash of already roasted vegetables at the ready make meal prep a breeze and the different combinations and endless so you never have to get tired of basic dishes.

I hope you are enjoying your winter CSA.

Posted in 2022, Miscellaneous, Recipes | Comments Off

Roasted Fennel

Posted on November 1, 2022 by mo

If you haven’t tried roasting fennel you should. Roasting fennel brings out sweet and caramel flavors and the strong licorice taste of raw fennel becomes very subtle and more rounded. Much how onions become sweet and less sharp when they are roasted.

I think roasted fennel is a simple elegant side dish. Here is some roasted fennel with this simple cauliflower sauce.

You want to roast fennel pretty hot and quick to make sure it caramelizes. Cut up your fennel bulb add some olive oil and salt and pepper and roast it in a 400-425F oven for 20-25 minutes.

I hope you give it a try.

Posted in 2022, Fennel, Recipes | Comments Off

Thank You CSA Members!

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Amy

Barn at Thomas Open Space Farm This season has felt like a blur! This is a snowy photo from March, way back when we first leased the Thomas Open Space Farm in Lafayette. It’s hard to believe that was just this past spring. It was a much bigger challenge than we expected to move a large part of our operation to a new location. (But of course it was more than we expected! Isn’t that just the way these things go?) Now we have one season under our belts, an incredibly welcoming community in Lafayette, and a huge amount of support from the City of Lafayette Open Space staff. It feels a lot less overwhelming to think about next season now that we’ve been through this year and have an idea of how this new farm works instead of just a bunch of dreams about the future.

Like every season, we had lots of challenges and successes. I’m always reminded of the first few lines of A Tale of Two Cities when I think back on each farm season! The snow pack looked great in March but then we did not get a single drop of rain in April! We did our regular early season plantings in March and we had enough irrigation water in our storage ponds to water the seedlings for a month or so but then we ran out of storage water at two of our farms in May. And it was so dry that the irrigation ditches at these two farms turned on really late. We lost a few crops because we didn’t have enough water (the first of many reasons we didn’t successfully grow any carrots this year) and it was a near thing on being able to keep all the onions and potatoes alive.

Fortunately the City of Lafayette has a different water source for Thomas Open Space Farm and we had irrigation water available there in May. Wyatt threw away a lot of his crop plans and we moved the majority of our crops over to this new farm. That was a huge leap of faith! I would not recommend gambling the farm on growing crops in unfamiliar soil and an unfamiliar irrigation system. We originally thought we would start out slowly and grow just a few crops there this year to see how they grew in this new soil. We didn’t have much choice though. It was looking like our other two farms might have hardly any irrigation water this season. I can’t believe how lucky we got though! Wyatt and the crew did a fantastic job and a lot of the crops there did amazingly well. (Part of it may have been the fact that Wyatt panicked and thew a little extra organic fertilizer on the crops just for good measure!)

Cherry Tomatoes

Our home farm on 63rd Street was more hit and miss. The tomatoes in our caterpillar
tunnels were unbelievable! I can’t believe we were still able to harvest some cherry tomatoes this week. But we’re still losing the battle with all the Canada thistle in our fields. Our winter squash plants really suffered and we got much lower yields than we were hoping for.

We’re also struggling with all the things the rest of the world is dealing with: the impacts of Covid, the continuing labor shortage, and my complete lack of knowing how to run a business in a period of high inflation. As far as the labor shortage, this is the third year in a row that we’ve been extremely short staffed. Our crew did an amazing job of getting our 500+ CSA members fed each week! I feel like we were worried almost every week that we wouldn’t be able to pull it off but somehow the crew made it happen!

There are so many ups and downs and challenges each season. There is one single reason we are able to keep doing it: our CSA members. Farming is so uncertain and our CSA members give us the financial stability to keep our farm going year after year. We receive payment at the beginning of the season so a lot of the guess work is taken out of budgeting each year. (Although, back to the part about inflation, I have no idea how to deal with this!) One example is that we don’t have to worry about the weather in terms of selling our vegetables. When our crops are ready, we have to get them into people’s hands right away. They can’t sit on a warehouse shelf for a few weeks if it’s a rainy weekend and nobody goes shopping with us at the farmers’ market. We lose those crops and those sales but still have to find the money to cover payroll. Our CSA members come to get their veggies no matter what the weather is outside! We also have a much better idea of how much to grow each year. It’s a lot easier to calculate how much food we need for 500 CSA members as opposed to guessing how much we will sell at a farmers’ market, our farm store, or through restaurant orders.

Another thing that keeps us going is the gratitude we get from our CSA members. It’s the little comments you make at the pickups when you tell us how much you enjoyed something like the peppers or arugula last week. I also have what I call our “CSA love letters”. These are emails or handwritten notes telling us how much our farm means to our members. My personal favorite is what I think of as “CSA kids”. These are the kids who have grown up in families who have been our CSA members for years. The kids get excited about things like peas, turnips, beets, and kale when they see these things on the table at CSA pickup. What normal kid gets excited about turnips?! It feels good to know that we are helping to teach kids that vegetables are delicious when they are grown the right way.

My sincerest thanks for being there with us for yet another farm season. I hope we’ll see you next year or even this winter! ~Amy

Posted in 2022, Farm, Newsletter | 1 Comment

Cauliflower ‘Rice’

Posted on October 18, 2022 by mo

I am super late to trying cauliflower rice. I was/am perfectly happy to make and eat rice. I love the flavor and texture so I didn’t see the point in messing with what I thought was already a good thing, until I (and probably you) found myself with huge amounts of cauliflower from our CSA share this year! In the past month I have roasted cauliflower, made curry, and one of my favorite things to do with cauliflower is to make this delicious sauce. I still found myself with more cauliflower to eat in my refrigerator.

So, I tried making cauliflower rice and I love it. It’s super easy and fast to make. Fluffy and crunchy at the same time and unlike regular rice, cauliflower rice is really good cold and room temperature. AND it freezes beautifully!

To make it all you do is break off some cauliflower florets and pulse them 8 or 10 times in food processor until it looks like rice. Or you can use a box grater if you don’t feel like busting out the food processor.

To cook it all I did was heat a little oil in a pan with garlic and sauteed the cauliflower until it was just starting to turn brown and added some salt and pepper and chives. You don’t have to brown it if you might want it just cooked through and leave it more white. Any herb would be nice here as would any sauce, just like rice! This is a really nice side dish and pretty much goes with anything.

You can steam cauliflower rice or even eat it raw! I love making ‘Buddha Bowls’ with the leftovers and other odds and ends I have laying around.

I haven’t tried it yet but I think making fried ‘rice’ with cauliflower would be so good.

Well Folks, this is the last week of our regular CSA. Thanks for your support. We appreciate you all so much and hope to see you back next year. The Winter CSA starts next week so sign up before we sell out! I love the winter CSA vegetables so SO SO much! I’ll be making lots of soups, stews, baked dishes! Yum!

See you at the last pickup!

Posted in 2022, Cauliflower, Recipes | Comments Off

Winter Radishes

Posted on October 17, 2022 by mo

Winter radishes start appearing in our last one or two regular season CSA shares. If you signed up for our Winter CSA you will see them more frequently.

Aren’t they pretty? The radishes we get in the spring are just as pretty and you can use both varieties in very similar ways. The main differences are the winter varieties are much less pungent than the spring radishes, more like our salad turnips, but so much prettier! Winter radishes store for a really, really long time, at least two months.

I keep mine in a plastic bag in my crisper drawer with a damp paper towel if they are whole. Once I cut into them I like to store them in the refrigerator in a glass jar with a lid and a damp paper towel on the bottom of the jar. The damp paper towel helps keep the color in the radish.

I slice them really thin and add (lots!) to salads, toast, tacos or sandwiches, or just snack on the them! They are so pretty and crunchy and fun! Try some pickled!

You can roast them like hakurei turnips, or braise them, but they will lose a bit of their color but they do add a nice texture and flavor to cooked dishes.

Winter radishes are a beautiful fun winter vegetable to enjoy. Have fun with yours!

Posted in 2022, Radish, Recipes | Comments Off

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