Hello!

We hope you’ve managed to stay cool this week; it sure hasn’t been easy to do! Weeks like this make farming incredibly challenging. Spring and Fall often feel peaceful and gentle for us vegetable growers, even if there’s an endless amount of work to do. When the weather is good, working long hours in the field can be quite pleasant. This week, honestly, has been anything but pleasant. We spent Monday and Tuesday frantically irrigating the fields, worried the well might run dry if the sky didn’t crack open with a summer storm. The plants were stressed from the heat and dry weather, which means that they’ll drop flowers and production will slow. Fortunately, we got massive storms on Tuesday and Wednesday night, giving us two inches of rain in two days. Of course, by Thursday afternoon, in parts of the farm where the soil doesn’t have a high water rentention capacity, you could hardly tell it had rained! We’re looking forward to an eventual break in the heat, but for now, we’re working through it and looking forward to cold beverages and afternoon swims.

If you’re a CSA member, or a regular market customer, chances are you’ve been eating a lot of eggplant and squash recently and you may find yourself in need of some culinary inspiration.

I love to thinly slice squash and throw it under the broiler, topped with a bit of chevre or feta, olive oil, and herbs. On a regular basis, I add summer squash and zucchini to simple summer tacos and quesadillas. One of my favorite recipes for summer squash is this one, Calabacitas Picadas con Jitomate, or chopped zuchinni and tomato, from Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico. It’s a versatile recipe, and you can substitute swiss chard for the zucchini, which is something else we grow a lot of at Two Boots. When I made it for dinner this week I added some sweet corn and a bit of Mexican oregano at the end, served with warm tortillas.

A child of the land of casseroles, I also have to admit my love of squash casserole. It’s the ultimate comfort food, and during these challenging times, comfort food is something I’m turning to quite often. Squash casserole is essentially just the vegetable version of mac and cheese.

If eggplant is something you’re finding challenging to use, know that you’re not alone! In my years of farming, I’ve found that it’s one of the vegetables that people most often want to know how to cook. My absolute favorite way to cook eggplant is also one of them simplest. All you have to do is prick the eggplant with a fork several times and throw it directly onto the flame on your stove, on top of the grill, or under your broiler, and rotate until the skin blackens, blisters, and softens, until feels like its about to collapse on itself. Transfer the eggplant to a bowl and cover, so that the eggplant steams for a few minutes and the skin is easy to slip off. Once you’ve removed the skin, you can mash the eggplant and add garlic, lemon, tahini, parsley, and olive oil, or transfer to a food processor and make a smoother baba ghanouj. We eat this at least twice a week during the summer, and crave it all winter.

Another eggplant favorite in my home is “fish-fragrant eggplant,” a Sichuan eggplant dish, which, despite the name, is free of fish. It requires a few ingredients that are less common in the average U.S. American kitchen, but they’re well worth finding for this fantastic dish! The slim, Japanese eggplant we grow are the best for this recipe, but if you’ve only got Italian eggplant, you can certainly make do with those.

One last, slightly laborious recipe for you: this recipe for a provencal tian, a delicious dish that incorporates squash, eggplants, and tomatoes (and if you don’t have time, you really don’t have to brown all of the squash and eggplant separately first. I’ve had delicious versions of this in which they are thinly sliced and not precooked and turn out great).

We’ll be returning to the Baltimore Farmers’ Market once again this weekend. The market runs from 7:00-12:00.

We’ve also decided to continue attending the market at Johnny’s. We’re grateful for you ongoing support and look forward to seeing you there! We’ll be there Sunday from 8:00-11:00 am.

Produce Availability 7/26 Markets

basil
beets
cherry tomatoes
cucumbers
eggplant
head lettuce
kale
parsley
shishito peppers
spring mix
summer squash
tomatoes
zucchini

And, as always, we’ll bring plenty of flowers with us.

Sincerely,

Amelia and the rest of the Two Boots Farm crew

Summer Cooking