In the share week:
2 lbs watermelon radishes
1 bunch salad turnips
1 head radicchio
1 head mini lettuce
Green peppers
2 lbs white sweet potatoes
1 bag spicy salad mix
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
The sweet potatoes are here! The first beds Cole dug out were mostly Japanese white sweet potatoes, so that is what you'll find in your share this week, but he just brought up a bunch more orange sweet potatoes, so you'll get plenty of those in the next couple of weeks. I really love the white sweet potatoes. You can use them pretty much interchangeably with the orange ones you are used to. They are particularly good baked or made into sweet potato fries if you are into that. Here's a simple side dish recipe with a sesame glaze:
I also think the starchy sweetness of the sweet potatoes would be a great balance to the bitter radicchio in your share this week. I know the radicchio can be a somewhat intimidating vegetable if you aren't used to it. It is a relative of lettuce and can be eaten raw in salads, but I really prefer to get some cooking on it first. For our farm lunch today, I made of pot of beans with some aromatic veggies (carrots, onions) and herbs, then roasted some watermelon radishes and a whole head of radicchio and we used those for toppings on our beans. We then topped the whole thing with a balsamic vinaigrette. It was pretty yummy! Treat the radicchio like kale - chop it into big pieces, oil and salt it, then roast for about 15 minutes at 400. Some of the leaves get a little crispy (like kale chips!), the sweetness comes through and the bitterness is tamped down. This would be a great pizza topping too! If you want some ideas for how to put together a sweet potato radicchio salad, I liked the flavors in this recipe:
If you want to read up a little more on the watermelon radishes, this was a pretty good post, with a nice recipe idea too. I don't know if I mentioned it already, but these radishes store a really long time (months) in the fridge. So don't feel like you need to use them right away. They will wait happily in your crisper drawer until you are ready for them.
We are working on getting the first of the overwintered greens planted this week - three beds of spinach. Our fall spinach sadly did not do well at all - it was just too hot and dry during it's first weeks of life. It's possible we may get a cut on it for the last week of the season, but I'm not too hopeful. Thankfully, the winter spinach is almost always really nice. I think it is just more suited to the winter season in our climate. We'll also plant our baby kale, arugula, cilantro and maybe some green onions. The rest of the hoophouse space will wait until late winter to get planted up into lettuce, kale, radishes, etc. Maybe next fall we'll get a big greenhouse built so we can have lettuce through the winter!
Hope you all have a great week!