• Leeks: These are the last of our overwintering vegetables. We started them 13 months ago and have been eating them since October. Leeks are biennials, meaning they flower in their second growing year. They’re starting to send up a central flowering stalk now, so we’ve harvested the last of them. You won’t see leeks again in your share for five or six months, so enjoy them! Leeks can be substituted for onions in any cooked dish, and they make for delicious soups. They’re not as pungent, and they cook down more than regular onions. Sometimes some dirt gets between the leaves, and the plant grows around it. If you cut the shaft in half lengthwise you can look for the dirt before chopping.
• Turnips: These Asian hybrid turnips are a new vegetable for us. They’ve won us over quickly and we enjoy munching them raw for their crisp texture and fruity flavor. These turnips are great raw and make a nice salad topping. They can also be cooked along with their greens. See the recipe below featuring cooked turnips. We don’t have as many of these to give out as we were hoping. It seems as if the voles preferred them over everything else in the greenhouse. You may receive all white hakurei or a mix of hakurei and scarlet queen turnips.
• Radishes: These French Breakfast radishes are great as a salad topping. Did you know that radishes can be cooked as well? Their greens are also tasty cooked as you would any other pot green.
• Pea Shoots: Pea shoots might be new to you. We enjoy them chopped raw in salad or cooked up in a stir fry. They have a nice peas-ey flavor! Check out the simple preparation in the recipe section.
• Spring onions: These look like scallions – actually they are immature Walla-Walla sweet onions. Last fall we had extra starts, so we planted some in the greenhouse, at closer spacing than normal, to harvest as scallions. The whole thing, top and bottom, is great chopped into stir fry, sautéed to add to pasta, or any other way you would use scallions.
• Spinach: We’ve had our best crop of spinach ever this year. This spinach is out of our greenhouse, so it’s gotten a good head start. See below for a great spinach recipe that can serve as a main dish or a side.
• Mizuna: The leafy green with the jagged leaves might be new to some of you. Mizuna is a delicious, tender salad green with no hint of bitterness. We like to mix it in with lettuce or spinach salads or serve it alone, wilted slightly with a warm vinaigrette.