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Quintessential Fall Veg
Dense, large, round: just a few adjectives that sum up this week's share. You're gonna find hefty purple cabbages banging around next to giant kohlrabi, kissing shoulders with earthy beets and some jumbo yellow onions. The only thing that's smaller than normal in this week's assemblage of vegetables are the butternut squash. Small, but still dense. More on that later.
I know it's been a few months, but all of you should be well-practiced kohlrabi-eaters by now. The variety you're getting this week is called "Kossack," aptly named given that most of them weigh in at well over 3 pounds. I know they look intimidating, but once you peel back that light green skin you're in for the most tender, tasty kohlrabi experience there is. Kossack is a storage variety and it will indeed keep for months in your fridge. Above all, I love this variety peeled and cut into sticks for some crunchy crudites. It's a proven favorite with kids, too.
There's also a head of sugarloaf chicory in your share. Once the weather turns nasty and shuts down our head lettuce production we switch to chicories. They are tough little plants that can withstand hail, frost, pelting rain, and all manner of abusive winter weather. Peel back a few layers of wrapper leaves and voila! there's a blanched beauty of a salad inside. Sugarloaf chicory belongs to the same family as radicchio and endive, so it has a slight bitterness. This variety is the least bitter of all the types I've tried, and if you're at all sensitive to it try slicing your chicory into ribbons and soaking it in cold water for 10 minutes before you make your salad. I also like to include sweet ingredients in my chicory salads, like sliced apples or candied nuts, or make a honey-ed salad dressing of some kind. It balance the flavors nicely. People also cook with chicories, although I'm not a fancy enough chef to have ventured down that road so far.
OK, about those diminutive butternut squash: we accidentally dry-farmed them. Yup, that's right, these little squashies grew all season without a drop of irrigation water. Big whoops. After a summer of wondering what the deal was with those few rows of butternut squash that seemed kinda stunted (!), I did a little detective work and discovered that the irrigation header that was buried in weeds next to the fenceline had come undone, probably way back in June when we were cultivating the squash with the horses. On one of our passes through the field we hooked the irrigation header with the cultivator and must have yanked it apart at a coupler near the fence.
The good news is that what they are lacking in size these little butternuts make up for with flavor. Dry-farming always concentrates plant sugars (in tomatoes and tree fruit also) and results in a more intense flavors. It's maybe not such a bad trade-off, plus I always love seeing what plants can do without irrigation just in case that day eventually comes when there's not as much water to be had (hard to imagine today as the rain comes down in buckets, I know...).
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