Red Wagon Farm

Rhubarb Crisp

Posted on June 8, 2021 by mo

Rhubarb crisp might be the easiest most delicious dessert there is. I say dessert, but I love having it for breakfast with yogurt.

There are almost 3 million rhubarb crisp recipes on the internet, the ones I looked at are almost all identical. Most include strawberries or apple. I like all rhubarb. You can add different fruit if you like and adjust the weight of the fruit the recipe calls for.

Let’s make a crisp! Gather all your ingredients

For the filling you’ll need;

1 to 1 1/2 pounds of rhubarb (optional addition of strawberries or apples to total 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of fruit)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the topping you’ll need;

3/4 cup flour, any kind. I used whole wheat. You can use gluten free or all purpose or anything you have on hand.
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons white sugar
pinch of salt
6 tablespoons of butter cut very small
3/4 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup any nuts you like (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350F

Put all the filling ingredients in a bowl and mix and put all the topping ingredients in a separate bowl and mix with a pastry cutter or just use your hands. This picture is before I mixed the topping ingredients.

I had an 8X8 square pan and this fit just fine. You might want to put your baking pan on a cookie sheet if you think it might bubble over.

Put your filling in a baking dish then top with the oat mixture that is really well mixed. It should look like this.

Bake for 45 to 50 minutes until it’s brown and bubbly.

Yum. Enjoy.

Posted in 2021, Recipes, Rhubarb | Comments Off

Bok Choy Stir Fry-Make Ahead Sauce

Posted on May 31, 2021 by mo

I really got into Asian-ish cooking during the pandemic. I love how vegetable heavy it is and how adaptable the cuisine is to almost anything you have on hand.

I made a super easy Bok Choy and tofu dish with a super easy sauce.

This is what I had, Bok choy, garlic, ginger, tofu and some sauce I premade. The recipe is below.

I chopped it up.

I cooked the tofu in some oil. After it was brown I moved it to a plate.

Then I sautéed some garlic and ginger root and cooked the Bok Choy until it was just wilted.

Now add 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sauce and let that thicken.

Plate and serve can you see that yummy sauce? We ate this with rice.

I like to make this batch of stir fry sauce and have it on hand for quick meals or to clean out the vegetable drawer. This sauce recipe makes about 3 or 4 meals and uses just a few ingredients you can find at most supermarkets. You just put everything into a jar and shake it.

Stir Fry Sauce

1 1/2 cups chicken stock (or vegetable or mushroom stock)
1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine or dry cooking sherry
1 tablespoon brown sugar (or granulated sugar, maple syrup, agave)
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/4 cup soy sauce (can sub gluten-free soy sauce or tamari)
1 1/2 tablespoons dark soy sauce (BBQ sauce works too)
2 tablespoons oyster sauce (or vegetarian or gluten-free oyster sauce)
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons cornstarch

Combine everything in a jar and shake it up. Store leftovers in the refrigerator to use later. This makes enough for at least 3 meals for 4 people.

Store the extra in the refrigerator, it will keep for at least 2 weeks.

Phew, this was a long post. If you stuck with me to the end, thank you!

See you at pick up!

Posted in 2021, Bok Choy, Recipes | Comments Off

Fried Beans with Sorrel and Green Garlic

Posted on May 24, 2021 by mo

I love sorrel. I love sorrel with eggs. I love sorrel mixed in with any sautéed greens or added to a salad. It brings a bright flavor, more mild and more interesting than lemon.

I followed this David Lebovitz recipe pretty much to the letter except I used green garlic instead of green onions. I’ll copy the recipe at the end of this post.

What makes this dish special is frying the cooked beans. Frying them makes them crispy on the outside and creamy inside and just a little chewy and very satisfying. The sorrel brightens the dish and the green garlic rounds it out.

This is all you need to make this; some beans (I cooked my beans, I’m sure you could use canned) a bunch of sorrel and I added pea shoots too, and some green garlic or onions and lemon.

The recipe as written sounds a little complicated, but all you are really doing is frying the beans in oil and butter, the butter browns the beans so if you use only oil they won’t brown as much.

Then sauté some greens and garlic or onions and mix them together and add a squeeze of lemon. You really don’t need a recipe.

We ate ours with an egg and some crushed almonds and feta and fresh mint.

Have a great week. See you at pickup.

Fried Beans with Feta, Sorrel, and Sumac
Four to six servings
Adapted from Plenty (Ebury) by Yotam Ottolenghi

Yotam’s original recipe says to soak the beans in a generous amount of water with 2 tablespoons of baking soda. Some bean purists scoff at using baking soda in the water, but for those who live in areas where the water is full of minerals (such as Paris), I add a large pinch to the cooking water, as the locals do. The beans should be cooked just until tender, but not cooked to mush. The cooking time for them will vary but don’t let the water
foam up when you do! For the spring onions, I used cébette (which often goes by
various names in France), which you can see pictured in the Herbed Ricotta Tart
recipe. Scallions, green garlic, or a similar spring onion can be used. In the post, I
mention some possible substitutions for the sumac and sorrel.

1 pound (450g) large dried white beans
optional: pinch of baking soda
8 spring onions or scallions sliced lengthwise into 3-inch (7 cm) batons
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
7 ounces (200g) sorrel, cut into 1-inch (2 cm) ribbons, plus a little extra for garnish,
cut in very thin strips
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, plus more for seasoning
1 1/2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
5 ounces (150g) feta cheese
2 teaspoons sumac
handful of fresh herbs such as chervil, dill, mint, or flat-leaf parsley
For frying the beans:
1/4 cup (60ml) olive oil
4 tablespoons (60g) butter (see Note)

1. Rinse the beans and sort to remove any foreign objects.
2. Put in a large pot, cover with plenty of water, and let stand overnight.
3. The next day, add a pinch of baking soda to the water (if you live in a hard water
area), and simmer the beans until just tender. The cooking time may be as little as
30 minutes, or over an hour, depending on the beans. Add additional water if
necessary.
4. Once cooked, drain well and toss them in a bit of olive oil, which will prevent the
skin of the beans from flaking, and bit of salt.

Posted in 2021, Garlic, Herbs, Recipes | Comments Off

Difficult Start to the Farm Season

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Amy

I thought 2020 was a tough year at the farm but so far 2021 has been much more difficult here! Between the very cold, wet spring and a nationwide labor shortage, we have had a hard time during our busy spring planting season. We are short staffed and only have about 75% of the crew that we need. And the farm crew has only been working 2-3 days per week because of all the rain.

Fortunately, Wyatt and the farm crew were able to get a lot of the cool season crops planted in March and early April. But many of those crops are several weeks behind because it’s been so cold and cloudy. They put in thousands of lettuce plants that should be ready now but won’t be ready for a few more weeks. The same is true for bok choi, napa cabbage, turnips, radishes, chard, kale, and collards. We have a lot of spinach planted, but spinach is sensitive to being over-watered and many of our spinach plants have turned yellow.

muddy fields

The very wet spring will have an impact in July and we might be low on crops to harvest then. We plant a lot of crops in late April and early May that are usually ready in July. It is too hot for greens like lettuce and spinach in July so we count on other crops that can take the summer heat. Wyatt says we had 2,000 cabbage plants and 3,000 broccoli and cauliflower plants in our greenhouse that we had to put in the compost pile. Our fields have to be dry enough to prepare the soil and plant the transplants. We couldn’t do that with all the rain and mud. By mid-May all the cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower starts in our greenhouse had gotten too big for their pots and were unusable. If we were to start new plants in our greenhouse now, they wouldn’t be ready until August.

Tomatoes in the greenhouse

There is some good news for the crops in our fields, though. We use greenhouses and caterpillar tunnels to get some summer crops started early. We have over 1,000 tomato plants that are already flowering and should give us tomatoes sometime in July. We also have 400 zucchini plants in the tunnels that are already flowering. And we were able to get in a planting of green beans and two plantings of sweet corn that will be ready mid-summer.

On Monday I thought I might have to also report that our farm was flattened by a hail storm! Fortunately, we did not get any hail (only a ton of rain) at our farm on 63rd Street. We did get some hail at our farm on Valmont Road and the plants suffered some damage, but Wyatt thinks it’s not enough damage to kill the plants and that they will mostly recover.

Wow that feels like a lot! This is why we count so much on you, our CSA members! I know that we will almost certainly be able to pull out of this and have a good summer with plenty of crops to harvest. In 18 seasons of farming we’ve always made it through weather disasters–including the 2013 flood. Thank you so much and we look forward to seeing all of you in the next few weeks as our CSA pickups get started!

Amy

Posted in 2021, Farm, Newsletter | Comments Off

Thank You Winter CSA Members!

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Amy

Kai and Jenny getting your CSA shares packed up for this afternoon.

Thank you so much to everybody who joined us for our first ever Winter CSA! We think it was a huge success and I hope you agree with us! Our greens did great in our greenhouses and caterpillar tunnels and we were able to continue harvesting some of the heartier vegetables like carrots and radishes.

We decided to do a Winter CSA this year mainly because of the pandemic. We usually finish our CSA season at the end of October but continue to sell vegetables to restaurants until the end of the year. However, most restaurants are struggling so much right now that we knew we couldn’t count on that income for the farm. I also decided that I was not comfortable having our (crowded!) pumpkin patch this year so the farm lost that income as well. A Winter CSA was the obvious choice for us to distribute all the late-season produce in our fields and also replace some of the lost income for the farm. We are so happy we made this choice and look forward to having a Winter CSA in future years!

One of the big challenges of having a vegetable farm in Colorado is that we do not have year-round work for our farm crew. That means we start with a (mostly) new crew every season. Imaging training a whole new work force every year! The Winter CSA extended our work season by about 6 weeks which means that Kai (CSA manager) and Jenny (harvest manager) had a little more work and won’t have as much time off before full-time work starts again in mid-March. That means we have a better chance of keeping these awesome people for a few years!

The pandemic has been so hard on all of us. But one positive is that has forced a lot of us to try things outside our comfort zones. And thus the birth of our Winter CSA!

Wyatt and I hope you all have a safe winter and that we’ll see you again with some fresh veggies in May!

Amy

Posted in 2020, Farm, Newsletter | 3 Comments

Stir Fry Sauce

Combine everything in a jar and shake it up. Store leftovers in the refrigerator to use later. This makes enough for at least 3 meals for 4 people.

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