Winter meal ideas

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Wow, the greenhouse is really producing now and it’s so nice to harvest in the warmth of it instead of the cold garden! Well we still did get kale from the field this week, but the other greens were inside and so lovely! In your bags this week you will find: Kale, Tatsoi, Mustard Greens, Butternut, Beets, Carrots and Napa Cabbage for the Full Shares. We used the asain greens in a stir fry this week when we were watching a friends children. We had 11 children between only two families! 7 of them were 5 and under so we needed a quick, easy, lunch that everyone would eat!

We made some rice in the instant pot(I use half water and half broth when cooking rice), browned some ground beef and pork sausage and just chopped the asian greens and sauteed them. Then on the side we whisked an awesome peanut sauce together, this one I actually measure! Most of you know I don’t usually cook with a recipe! Our sauce recipe is:

1 C Peanut Butter, 4 TBS liquid aminos, 4 TBS maple syrup, 4 TBS lime or lemon juice, 1/2 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp sesame oil, about 1/2 C water to thin.

I love how easy it is to enjoy whole food! Ok, so the maple syrup surely helps the kids eat this meal, but it’s really not much and has some vitamins and minerals in it :) If you have any winter radishes hanging around in your fridge still, try making soup! RADISH SOUP!

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 cups sliced radishes (from 2 bunches), divided (Or some of the large winter radishes)

½ cup chopped onion

1 medium Gold potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

2 cups milk

½ teaspoon salt

1/4-1/2 teaspoon white or black pepper

¼ cup sour cream

1 tablespoon chopped fresh radish greens or parsley

Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add 1 3/4 cups radishes and onion and cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are beginning to brown and the radishes are translucent, about 5 minutes. Add potato, milk, salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat to a simmer, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the potato is tender, about 5 minutes more. Use an immersion blender and top with sour cream and chopped greens. Enjoy!

We can’t wait to start baking some pies again, butternut and sweet potato make a great pumpkin pie. Our pie pumpkins didn’t do well this year, but we can’t tell a difference between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie. So when God gives you 4,400 pounds of sweet potatoes, you make SWEET POTATO PIE!

We do have some Christmas Turkeys available frozen for sale, please email if you want to know what sizes are available. We also have Lamb cuts from our friends farm so please email me if you want to know what they have available for your holiday table!

Have a lovely week and enjoy the food!

Blessings,

Your Farmers

December is here!

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We hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving, we were so thankful for the mild weather! We had a lovely harvest of some huge turkeys, with the average being 23 pounds! Yum! We are finishing up getting the tree farm closed up. It’s amazing that we sold out of trees from our beautiful family farm in Highland county, VA, in just two days! The cabin still has lots of lovely wreaths and center pieces to brighten your home. The smell is amazing! We will be in the cabin from 2-5 Saturday for selling local Christmas gifts and handing out the meat shares. We are fully stocked with all the herbal items, so grab some before they are gone!

The farmer girls are busy planting a few hundred tulip and daffodil bulbs to make the farm more cheerful next spring! The farmer boys have news too! Tommy bought an interesting cart that you lay down on to pick vegetables and strawberries. It’s a great invention that is solar powered and saves your back from the difficult process of harvesting things that grow close to the ground! It’s to help him with his new enterprise of organic strawberries! Last year he took over the lettuce production on the farm and this year he is taking over the strawberries. Meanwhile middle farmer boy, Timmy, has decided to become a broom maker. He is going to begin is first broom today! I just hope that he practices using it a lot in the farm house!

We are harvested the first greens out of the new greenhouse! All the work it was makes them taste better to me! The radishes and mustard greens from this week are among the first things we harvested. There is plenty more great stuff to come! The kale is still doing great in the field and I can’t get enough root crops this time of year. So great in soups and roasted! Don’t forget to roast the seeds of the butternut with a little coconut oil and salt! OH and beet chips, I love to slice them thin, brush them with oil and salt and then roast at 350 until crisp. They disappear so fast!

Well have a great week, and enjoy your Christmas preparations! I’ll be posting my favorite hot coco recipe soon, I can’t wait to dig it out!

Blessings,

Your farmers

Happy Thanksgiving!

(For CSA Holiday schedule please make sure the read details at the bottom, thank you!)

We have much to be thankful for and you are on that list! We couldn’t be farmers without you in fact! Whether you are a farm member, occasional shopper, friend or family, we appreciate your support and encouragement. We have had a wonderful year and are looking forward to our final 2 farming ‘seasons’ of the year…..Turkey and Trees! We hope you enjoy a season of Thankfulness, filled with good food and special memories!

We will be harvesting our turkeys today and have them available for those that have reserved them (we are sold out) on Tuesday from 2-6 PM at the farm store, and some will be going to Willowsford Farm for their holiday pick up as well. We have fond memories of cooking our first farm raised Thanksgiving Turkey with Emeril Lagasse! What an experience that was! We like to stuff our turkeys with veggies not stuffing. As the veggies cook they give off steam, keeping the bird moist instead of drawing liquid out. I also like to rub my turkey with butter and herbs under and over the skin before cooking. We hope you enjoy yours as much as we enjoyed growing it for you! For a hilarious video of the farmer children and turkeys at “play” see our facebook page.

Christmas Trees will be happening here as soon as the dishes are done from the big feast! Well actually we open Friday at 10 AM. We will have wreaths and centerpieces made by the talented farmer girls, white pine roping, fraser fir trees (freshly harvested from our family farm in Highland county, VA), FREE hot cider and loads of homemade organic gifts in the farm store! Pony rides will be available for an extra fee.

This week we made a fun meal. I find the men in the house like the food to have a name, do you? I like to just saute veggies and meat, put it over rice and call it a stir fry! But the guys get excited if it sounds like a restaurant. So we made a “butternut, kale bowl” yesterday! Sounds fancy, but it was really easy and delicious! We made rice in the instant pot, tossed in the chopped kale when it was done, and peeled and chopped up a butternut and boiled it on the stove until tender. After we added some browned sausage and the butternut to the instant pot we put a dribble of honey, vinegar and a generous pat of butter on! Wow, it was a hit!

Well, delivery this week is scheduled for Tuesday instead of Thursday since we hope everyone will be busy enjoying themselves Thursday! Also pick up here for CSA will be Tuesday from 12-6 and Saturday from 12-6 PM. Remember next week is the December meat pick up! Also, if anyone wants some Lamb for the holidays please email me for a list of what is available from our friends the” other” Bakers! Their lamb is raised on pasture with supplements of Non GMO grains and lots of love! It will be available in the farm store after you order.

Week 3 Winter CSA

Welcome winter! Wait it’s still fall…..but the weather is fooling us. We’ve been battening down the hatches here to keep the greens happy. And the cows, pigs, horses, turkeys, chickens, donkey, dogs, cats…and the humans! All the winter clothes have come out of storage early this year!

We are also watching the turkeys size up and start looking yummy! I’m looking forward to saving a few for winter meals. We had the BEST dinner the other night! Farmer Sean saw how busy we were making wreaths and came to the rescue by making stir fry with eggplant, peppers, carrots, onions, scrambled eggs, sausage and rice. We used the instant pot for some fast rice….brown rice and broth in only 30 minutes is amazing! And he found a recipe for a brown sauce that used broth and liquid aminos. What a treat!

This week we are enjoying potatoes, kale, kohlrabi, two types of lettuce, butternut squash (tis the season), and full shares got beets and carrots! We have had lots of butternut soup, it’s so nice with apples and onions and even adding sausage! Roasted beets and carrots are also popular around here. Tonight’s menu is sloppy joes, oven fried potatoes and salad. We just brown ground beef and sausage with some diced peppers and onions and add ketchup and mustard. Yum! Then we cut the potatoes and toss with melted lard to evenly coat them and roast in the oven for 45-60 minutes at 350. To spruce up salad this time of year, we peel and dice kohlrabi, add some dried fruit and make a homemade vinaigrette.

We had a nice trip to Dolly Sods, WVA a few weeks ago and enjoyed this view! We hope to go back in the spring. Enjoy your week!

Blessings,

Your farmers

November is here

Well with the chill in the air, we are so glad digging sweet potatoes is behind us! We also got all our 1,500 strawberry plugs planted last week. A little late, but so glad it’s done. They are as I write being tucked under row cover by the other farmers so they will be snug tonight when it dips into the 20’s! The season is certainly changing around here. We harvested 80 Fraser Fir trees on Monday from our family farm in Monterey, VA. We have begun to make wreaths with them. It’s fun to think about Christmas this far ahead! We make most of our wreaths closer to Thanksgiving, but one of our whole clients decorates for a shopping mall and they want them early! So the barn loft has been converted into the wreath makers shop and that’s where you will find the “elves” or farmers working these chilly days!

This week our shares have lettuce, arugula, kale, sweet potatoes, butternut, eggplant and peppers, oh and kohlrabi for the full share members. The arugula doesn’t hold well, so I recommend gently sauteing it and putting it in quiche soon. The kale is awesome and sweet this time of year. I find myself wanting chicken pot pie a lot and my solution to no green beans this time of year is fun! I take the ribs of the kohlrabi or kale leaves and cut them about 3/4 in long and boil for a few minutes. Then I use them in a pot pie recipe in place of green beans. The kohlrabi also makes great low carb “potatoes” inside the pie. Delish, local, seasonal and not in the least wasteful! The sweet potatoes have been tried so many ways and we are loving them all! I use the white ones in soup as regular potatoes and it adds a nice sweetness.

Our favorite hot coco recipe is going to be dug out of the recipe box this weekend to use with our lovely raw milk. I’ll share it again soon. I’m to the bottom of the cheese freezer as well, so maybe we will start making some cheese again and share some of our favorites with you. If you have extra milk, the easiest thing to do is make some yogurt.

We have been enjoying our new ginger beer operation and waiting for our kombucha to get up and going again. The ginger beer is yummy and good in different ways! I hope you enjoyed it in your fermented shares. We also sent out a fun herbal share this month. Elderberry tincture, not yummy like syrup, but very effective and full of medicine! Take 1/2-1 tsp daily or as needed (like every hour or two if illness is coming on). The lotion bars are great this time of year with dry hands being a problem. The pumpkin pie tea, is my favorite when it’s cold outside, drink up! YUM!

We hope you all enjoy and can’t wait to see you around the farm! OH, and it’s almost too late to order a Thanksgiving turkey, but there are a few spots left. Send us an email if you’d like to reserve one!

Blessings,

The Bakers

Any Guesses on our Sweet Potato Harvest?

We have grown 2,000 sweet potato slips for 3 or 4 years in a row now and have been happy with our results every year. We plant organic slips in May and eat some greens from them in August when other greens aren’t thriving and then in October we dig a few to see how they are sizing up. Mostly to get a taste of those nice roots that we’ve been missing! Around mid October we get serious and set aside a day or two to cut all the vines and move them and then begin the digging. We cure them in a heated room at 90 degrees for two weeks and then store them and enjoy all winter!

This year we decided to be wise and set aside two full days for this project…..then on the second day we realized it would take at least another whole day to finish, so we plodded along. Each root gets turned over with a plow or shovel, then gently wiped by hand and left to dry for a few hours, then picked up by hand and placed in a box and carried by hand to our storage room. These babies are grown and harvested with a lot of love and hand work. So as the rain prediction grew stronger and the night went on we had dinner and put the farmer children to bed. Farmer Sean and I headed back out with headlamps to finish the harvest and not ruin the potatoes. As it started to sprinkle a little past midnight we were hauling in the last of them! We pulled out the tarps we use for weed and erosion control and covered as much of the bare dirt as we could so as to lesson the amount of damage to the earth with the rain coming. We were happy to see the next morning that it worked and the lovely soil was well protected! Now, a few long days later have turned our sweet potato field into lovely garden beds ready for our garlic to be planted this week. By the end we harvested 4,400 pounds of sweet potatoes!!!!

Big projects feel so good to finish! Friends came by and offered a hand at popping all the garlic so the cloves are ready to go in later today! Speaking of other big projects, we have had a week to regroup, spend a fun day off the farm and are ready to roll with the winter CSA. It begins tomorrow! We have changed the farm store hours for pick up on meat weeks to 2-5 both Saturday and Thursday to make it easier. We are open for sales of any kind in the farm store then as well, so if you aren’t a member and want some thing please come on by!

We will be enjoying lots of sweet potato recipes, but here is the first soup we are going to try:

4 large sweet potatoes(2 1/2 pounds), cut in half

  • cooking oil

  • 2 tablespoons butter

  • 1 cup finely diced yellow onion (about 1 medium onion)

  • 1/2 cup finely diced celery, (about 2 celery stalks)

  • 3 garlic cloves

  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano

  • 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger

  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

  • 3 cups chicken broth from the farm store

  • 14 ounces milk

  • Additional salt and black pepper to taste

Begin by roasting the sweet potatoes. Preheat oven to 400-degrees F. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment. Coat sweet potato halves with oil. Place down on lined baking sheet. Roast for 30 minutes at 400-degrees F. Discard peels. Transfer to a bowl and thoroughly mash. Or use your favorite instant pot recipe to cook them for a faster method!

  1. While sweet potatoes are roasting, heat a large saucepan over medium heat. Add butter and allow to melt. Add diced onion and celery; cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Grate garlic cloves directly into pan. Sprinkle in dried oregano, ground ginger, ground cumin, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring constantly for 1 minute.

  2. Stir in stock and milk. Bring to a low simmer; continue to simmer on low heat until potatoes are ready.

  3. Whisk in mashed sweet potatoes until combined. Salt and pepper to taste. For a smoother consistency, carefully transfer soup to a food processor or use an immersion blender!

Enjoy and we’ll see you at the cabin!

Fall Farm Tour 2019

As we begin to wrap up the summer 2019 CSA season we want to invite all our members (and any friends you want to bring) , to come see what is growing here! Really anyone interested in the farm is welcome to come see what we are all about! Come meet the piggies, cows, rabbits, horses, chickens and see the NEW huge hoop house we just finished building! FARM TOUR this weekend from 10-4 Saturday and Sunday! Come on out ya’ll!

We are excited to share the farm with you! We will be teaching a winter tincture class each day at 3 PM and doing tours all day. We will have lots of fun things to see and pet! We will have chili for sale from 11-2pm both days and the Baker girls baked goods as well. The farm store will be stocked up with goodies and CSA pick up will go on as usual.

This is the last pick up for the Summer shares and next week we are closed (except for members getting milk and egg shares). The Winter CSA will begin on October 31st and November 2nd (depending on which day you are scheduled to pick up). We look forward to growing for you all! What a wonderful community we have!

We hope you are all enjoying the cool weather, the animals and the winter greens sure are! It’s time to say goodbye to the warm season things like peppers, eggplant and okra….until next year!

Man is it hot!?!

We just got back from a wonderful weekend away with friends at their farm. It's always refreshing to enjoy their fellowship! We got to help with their hay harvest and attend a great program called Family Days on the Farm. We learned about organic orcharding, Lyme disease and some other great natural healing ideas. We are off and running again now and ready for fall planting! Isn't crazy that we think so far ahead?In the past month we have harvested our second batch of meat chickens, and started our batches of Thanksgiving turkeys! Tomorrow our next batch of meat chickens arrive and then the countdown to fall and winter really begin. Weeks of preparing to have lots of good things to eat this winter. We also had help from our friends little boy during our last chicken harvest. It was his first time experiencing it and watching his face as he pondered what was happening was amazing. At first he looked curious, then dismayed and then after being prompted by our eldest Tommy about whether or not he liked eating chicken, he triumphantly announced YES! And began to help! We take for granted that our children know and appreciate where there food comes from and how it gets to the table. Thank you to all who take the time to educate your families about this. We all love to eat and it makes sense that we should understand how that happens.We have some great veggies coming out of the garden right now! Peppers, Eggplants, Tomatoes, Okra, Rutabagas, Beets, Garlic, Onions, Potatoes, Green Beans, HOT peppers, Squash, Cucumbers, and more! Here is a fun idea for using lots of them! We have also been pickling our okra and cucumbers and look forward to enjoying them this winter!This week is meat pick up already for August, Thursday 2-4 and Saturday 3-5. Looking forward to seeing you then!Blessings,The Bakers