2021 CSA Farm Update: Week 2

Welcome everyone to Week 2 of the Katchkie Farm CSA. We hope you enjoyed all the produce the past week and found some tasty ways to enjoy it. Summer has officially begun, and we are very busy on the farm. This time of year, for vegetable farmers, is always a balance of what needs to be done now and what has to be done now so we can have crops to harvest later. What is intangible is always easy to put off until October arrives and there are no carrots! This is surely a good profession to overcome procrastination. In a farmer’s working lifetime, we only get a change to plant those fall carrots 30 or 40 times. We better make it count!

This week, I would like to introduce my dear friend chard, perhaps known to some as Swiss chard. This wonderful chenopod comes in a plethora of colors. Red, gold, orange, silver, and pink. Do they all taste the same you may ask? I will leave that up to you to decide. In my opinion, it is the unsurpassed summer cooking green. Its buttery textured leaves and juicy stems when sauteed with a little butter and garlic and finished with lemon is truly a marvel of summer eating.

My great grandmother Elena was from the small Ligurian town of Torriglia. One of the things she brought with her from country was a gift of cooking. One of the gems of her cooking was “tutti” pie. A key ingredient is chard, which is first boiled, drained, and chopped, and then sautéed with butter and garlic. Next it’s mixed with beaten eggs and cheese and put into a pie crust to bake. The pie crust was not a fine buttery flaky crust like one would make for a desert, but rather one of more rustic character with a bit of bite to it. This coming weekend, I hope to try my hand at “tutti” pie, I hope you will too.

Until next time,
Farmer Jon