The Franklin County Farmers’ Market is putting on another Pop-Up Winter Market this Saturday, January 25, where we’ll be unveiling a couple of new products that we think will bring some sunshine to your winter: Roasted Tomato Juice and Pomodoro Tomato Jelly!

Over the summer, during peak tomato season, we slow-roasted our heirloom plum tomatoes to coax out as much flavor as possible, and canned the intense juice for a burst of tomato goodness any time of year. We think of the juice as a secret ingredient to add multi-layered tomato flavor—sweetness, tartness, and complexity—to all kinds of cooking. We use it like an intense stock: as the base of a soup, in a marinade, to cook grains, or to add an extra splash of flavor when roasting vegetables. Its high acid content makes it perfect for deglazing, as well. (Be aware that the acid in the tomato juice can affect the cooking of some beans and grains, so when in doubt, add the juice to already-cooked beans and grains). We like to experiment with the Roasted Tomato Juice and play in the kitchen and hope you do, too. Try it in this savory oatmeal recipe!

We also made some of the magical tomato juice into a really neat golden jelly that somehow has an almost honey-like or apple-like quality. It’s hard to describe the nuanced flavors that come through the Pomodoro Tomato Jelly—you’ll just have to try some!

You may have read about Dandelion Ridge Farm’s jar return program on the back of your canned good labels; for each jar returned to us, we will make a donation to a relevant cause. Roasted Tomato Juice jars prompt a donation to the Edible Schoolyard Program, which fosters a network of thousands of school gardens around the world, and creates edible education curricula. When you return a Pomodoro Jelly jar, we donate to the World Vegetable Center. This global non-profit develops nutrient-dense vegetable varieties and promotes efficient production methods to combat poverty and improve nutrition around the world. It also maintains an enormous bank of seeds and other plant genetic material, including about 12,000 specimens from indigenous vegetables around the world.

Seed saving, selecting, and sharing over the generations have developed an enormous diversity of vegetable varieties suited to the different situations, environments, needs, and priorities of the growers and their communities. Seed banks and libraries are invaluable repositories and caregivers of plant biodiversity that might otherwise be lost for reasons ranging from disuse and improper storage to natural disasters and climate change. This week, I learned about a beautiful art project celebrating and exploring the biodiversity within seed banks: Dornith Doherty’s Archiving Eden. Currently on display in Toronto, this interactive exhibition encourages visitors to exchange X-ray images of seeds with actual seeds of Canadian crops and wild plants. I was fascinated to learn of Doherty’s work here and hope you’ll find it inspiring, too!

Things are trucking along here at Dandelion Ridge Farm, settling into the autumn rhythm. We don’t have to water so much these days (thank goodness!), and are doing our best to keep cold sensitive plants like ginger warm enough. Greens like kale, collards, romaine, and dandelions are thrilled with the cooler weather, though—summer heat is not their friend! We hope to keep greens and herbs going throughout the winter.

We will have very limited quantities of tarragon, lemon thyme, and marjoram this week. These plants are young and not producing much yet, but I think we can manage a small harvest. Tarragon can be a challenge to get established, but its licorice-y flavor adds so much to a dish. Lemon thyme has a fun, citrusy brightness against thyme’s savory background. And marjoram has similarities to oregano, but is more subtle, sweet, and nuanced. Stop by our farmers’ market booth on Saturday to try some!

Today, I went to a workshop at one of the University of Kentucky’s Horticultural Research Farms about agricultural high tunnels. We got our tunnel this spring, and while it has been wonderful to grow in a more protected and controlled space, it is definitely an adjustment, with its own tricks and challenges. We always benefit from these educational opportunities and I certainly learned a lot from the experts today!

Kevin’s presentation at the Hudson Valley VegFest in Kingston, NY this past weekend was a hit! He spoke about our journey into farming, from harvesting and weeding in his parents’ subsistence garden as a kid to learning about more sustainable practices as an adult; from our meager first harvests from our raised bed garden in Asheville, NC six years ago to this year’s harvest of 4,300 pounds and growing! Kevin discussed the array of problems with the current corporate food system and the need for each of us to do what we can to break with the industrial model and engage more fully with the food that sustains us.

In the kitchen, I’ve been playing around with different ways to preserve ginger, including dehydrating both the roots and the stalks and leaves. I’m also working on an intense Ginger Marmalade made with apple cider, so stay tuned for that! I think it will be a great addition to a holiday menu!
Update: Try it in this Sweet Potato Hash with Ginger Marmalade for a perfect holiday side dish!

We’re digging up a storm this week at Dandelion Ridge Farm! We harvested our sweet potatoes this week–much to the chagrin of this toad, who was living amid the jungle of vines! Curing sweet potatoes at 80-90 degrees for a week helps them to store better and brings out their sweetness, so we set up a curing tent in our greenhouse to keep our sweet potatoes at a steady warm temperature during this period.
 
We also started harvesting our baby ginger! It’s a rare variety called Bubba Baba from the renowned Hawaiian organic ginger seed producer known as “Biker Dude!” Fresh young ginger is more tender and milder than the mature ginger available in stores. It lacks the thick cuticle and fibers that mature ginger have, so there's no need to peel it. Add it to smoothies or stir fries, candy it or use it in sweets, but try this beautiful delicacy while you can! The stalks and leaves make a delicious tea or stock for Asian soups—just put leaves in your cup, muddle, and steep.

We’re going to use some to make Kevin’s Ginger Miso Sauce to have over stir fry tonight! Find the recipe here.

This week, we’re bringing out the butternuts and candy roasters that we’ve been curing in the sun for a few weeks. The curing process brings out the squashes’ sweetness and helps them hold up for a longer shelf life.

If you’ve never tried a candy roaster, you’re in for a treat!  These long, curved, pastel-pink squashes are the size of a baseball bat with blue-green tips and rich, sweet flesh. You can store them for months, and they get sweeter as they age. This means they will be in fine form around the holiday season, ready to become pumpkin pie, winter squash soup, or risotto! The skin is very thin, so I don’t bother peeling them—I just cut them in half lengthwise, scoop out the large seeds, lightly oil the exposed flesh, and roast in the oven.  “When roasted with a little bit of fat,” Atlas Obscura says, “its orange flesh caramelizes to a creamy, candy-crunchy exterior with a burnt-sugar, buttery nuttiness.” Yum!

You can use candy roaster squashes in most recipes that call for butternut, such as Butternut and Red Lentil Curry or Roasted Butternut Hummus, but they have a little higher water content than butternuts, which can affect baked recipes like Butternut Sage Biscuits.

Last week, I shared a little bit about our mint varieties. Now I’d like to tell you about another of my favorite herbs: lemon balm! It is a member of the family Lamiaceae, as are mint, basil, and many other aromatic herbs. Its flowers attract a plethora of butterflies, bees, and other pollinators. It has a wonderful bright but soft lemony scent and flavor that shines in many of the same ways mint does, in both sweet and savory dishes. You can really use lemon balm anywhere you might use lemon; its flavor is just more subtle, herbaceous, and delicate.

We love infusing water with lemon balm—as with mint, just crunch up a bunch of it in a pitcher of water and keep it in the fridge, replenishing the water as needed. You can also dry it and use it to make tea. It is delicious in a salad dressing, or just chopped and added to a salad. Summer squash sautéed with minced fresh lemon balm, chives, and maybe a little dill makes a fantastic quick side dish, or add some chickpeas for a complete lunch! And it is amazing with fruits or in sweets, like these addictive lemon balm cookies!

We’re in the thick of tomato and tomatillo season here at Dandelion Ridge Farm, and the delicious fruits have taken over our lives! When we’re not harvesting, we’re canning or drying our harvests to last throughout the year. There isn’t much time for other garden work right now! Here are our towering tomato plants reaching for the sky!

But we’re excited to start unveiling some new canned goods this week, starting with Sweet Abundance Green Tomato Jelly. Kevin developed this recipe years ago when we were living in Asheville, NC, and a bad tomato blight left us with dead tomato plants and tons of green tomatoes. Our tomato plants are thriving this year, but we harvested some green tomatoes so that we could share this unique and delicious jelly with you! It has a beguiling sweet and subtly tart flavor that is excellent on cornbread—our favorite use! Try some at the Franklin County Farmers’ Market this weekend!

Check out this recipe for Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce--it's a delicious pizza sauce recipe Kevin developed  using our Principe Borghese sun-dried tomatoes—little power packs of intense tomato flavor so sweet and tasty that some of our customers eat them like candy!— and fresh paste tomatoes, as well as fresh herbs. Top your pizza with summer veggies like zucchini, eggplant, basil, or even more tomatoes!

What a wet week! The garden—and everything else—is saturated with rain, weeds and insects are out in full force, and it’s a challenge to even get out into the garden to get anything done in the mud. We’re very thankful for the protection of our agricultural high tunnel over our tomatoes, tomatillos, and some herbs, but could use a dome over the whole farm!

But weather aside, it’s been a good week! We were happy to contribute to the Franklin County Farmers’ Market’s first monthly South Frankfort Food Share program of the season. The Food Share is a cooperative buying program that allows people to buy a box of assorted vegetables on a sliding scale based on their income. In addition to food access, the program seeks to educate participants on how to use fresh vegetables that may be new to them, and to build community. Dandelion Ridge Farm was proud to contribute parsley and collards to this month’s variety of veggies. The next food share will be July 16; you can sign up for a share starting July 3 if you’re interested.

We’re also bringing some new items to market this week! We’re harvesting our first heads of red cabbage and first bunches of celery this week! The cabbage is a variety called Integro, with a beautiful pearlescent color and succulent, sweet leaves, and it is featured, along with green tomatoes, in our new Lizzie’s Chow Chow relish! This chow chow recipe was passed down from Kevin’s maternal great grandmother, Elizabeth Jenkins, an active subsistence farmer and food preservationist in rural east Texas. Her cooking skills—and the dishes she fed her loved ones--are family legends, and we’re excited to share her chow chow with you! We love it best over a big bowl of black eyed peas and cornbread for an extra dollop of luck and deliciousness!

I used to think of celery in the same category as onions and garlic; they add flavor and crunch to dishes, but other than raw celery sticks with a dip, I didn’t really think of them as a vegetable in their own right. I would buy a bunch of celery for a recipe, then only use a few stalks and the rest would sit in fridge until it got limp. But this year, I’ve gotten into roasting celery and eating it as a side dish, and this has totally changed my relationship with what is now one of my favorite vegetables! I don’t typically follow a recipe when roasting celery, but here is basically what I do. The flavors of thyme, tarragon, and fennel complement the celery really well. I hope you’ll try it and fall in love with celery like I did! Find the recipe for Roasted Celery and Fennel here.