Happy Summer! This box represents the end of the spring harvest and includes some of the fleeting treats of that transitory season – like milkweed pods!  Some, like the purple radishes and white turnips, grew faster and hotter than we usually see, since the heat has come on pretty fast and furious here in the past week. Others are at their perfect peak – like the salad and braising mix. Boy, is the salad crisp and fresh right now!

We’ve loaded you up with all sorts of greens for these first few boxes because many of these can’t be grown in the heat. Hope you’ve enjoyed them – you most likely won’t see so many again until fall. But we are trying to nurture along the salad mix and a few others under shade cloth to get a few more boxes out of them.  We try to get some fresh eating and some cooking greens in every box, since that’s the biggest bang for your nutritional buck, but high summer is the most challenging time to pull nice greens out of the garden.

Circle M Spring Salad Mix (bagged): So many treats in this mix! White arugula flowers and spicy pink radish flowers. Curly hot cress and sweet snow peas. We LOVE mixing up the salads and we hope you like eating them…

Herb Bouquet: Cilantro, Parsley and Mint (bunched): This fragrant bouquet has so many amazing flavors in it! You should have no problem identifying them by smell or taste, but look for dark green, glossy or curly leaves on the parsley, fragile, light green leaves on the cilantro and dark square stems on the mint.Store in a glass with a half inch of water in the fridge.

Head Lettuce: You’ve each gotten two crisp heads of either green Royal Oakleaf, speckled Mayan Jaguar or Red Iceberg. Save these until you’re done with the salad mix because it will last longer. Wash well leaf-by-leaf when you are ready to use because the flood did wash a fair amount of sand into the heads.

Dragon Mix (bagged): One of the things we love about braising mix is that you can eat it fresh or cook it. Terrific either way. This mix is both sweet (baby bok and tatsoi) and spicy (purple mizuna): hence the dragon moniker!  If you don’t want to eat the hot stuff raw, you can pull it off the top of the bag and cook it, which tames it a bit.

Milkweed (bagged): Hooray! This once a year treat is something we love to bring to our members from the meadows and prairies we have in our neighborhood. Obviously, monarch butterflies dig it, but you will, too! We promise. Saute these young buds up just like broccoli.  Wonderful in Asian or Italian recipes. We just go with garlic and olive oil.

Frisee Endive: This little head of curly bitter greens is an English favorite not so well known here, but we had a great wilted frisee salad at Lombardino’s in the winter.  We’ve been craving it ever since, and now finally these fancy little heads are ready to eat. Try sautéing mushrooms and shallots in olive oil, then pouring the hot mix over a few leaves of the frisee. Salt and pepper it –  then enjoy! These leaves can be added to a raw salad, but they are really best lightly cooked.  If you need a bigger salad, add the green Royal Oakleaf leaves – they have a hardy enough texture and flavor to stand up to wilting.

Arugula (bagged): YUM! You either love or hate this and I love it. We had several amazing arugula dishes this past weekend at Merchant – off the square in Madison.  We put some great recipes in the Box 2 Recipes blog post, but you can also just eat arugula like salad, or add it in. We like it on top of pizza, and that’s one of the dishes we had at Merchant, which is a terrific restaurant, by the way – check it  out! WARNING – very sandy! Wash again and spin.

Purple Radish with Greens: These purple radishes are a bit on the hot side, so cooking them isn’t a bad idea to soften and sweeten, if you don’t dig spicy. The greens are VERY tender and nutritious and you should cook and eat them in something. We’ve included a number of recipes this week on the Recipe blog.  Mix with the turnip greens and arugula for a bigger meal.

Salad Turnips with Greens: One of our favorite spring treats here at Circle M. We had a great crew lunch with these this week. Wonderful eaten raw, terrific cooked – these are a sweet cabbage-y  root that can get spicy in the heat.  Some of  these are hot, some not. Overall, they are less tender than we’d like, since we had some really hot weather a week ago, but they’ll cook up wonderfully. Use the greens, too.  Find some great ideas on the recipe post – you can use the radish and turnip bulbs together in a recipe, and likewise mix the greens together, too.

Sorrel (bagged): Back by popular demand! We got such a great response to this last week, with so many wonderful shared recipes, we had to pack it again. These bags are a bit smaller, as sorrel is really happier in cool weather and we didn’t have as much to pick this week.

Garlic Scapes: You’ve each gotten a curly-cue or two of garlic flower shoots. Chop these up small and use the way you would a scallion. Scapes are much hotter than garlic, though, so a little goes a long way. We’ll have garlic for you later in the summer, but we harvest these now to direct more energy toward the bulbs below the ground.

Basil Plants to Grow: These bagged balls of dirt are hardened off and ready for you to plant in your own garden or pot. Keep basil pinched back from the top, and it will make a big bushy clump you can harvest from literally every day all summer. Yay, summer!

Happy Summer! This box represents the end of the spring harvest and includes some of the fleeting treats of that transitory season. Some, like the purple radishes and white turnips, grew faster and hotter than we usually see, since the heat has come on pretty fast and furious here in the past week. Others are at their perfect peak – like the salad mix. Boy, is the salad mix crisp and fresh right now.

We’ve loaded you up with all sorts of greens for these first few boxes because many of these can’t be grown in the heat. Hope you’ve enjoyed them – you most likely won’t see so many again until fall. But we are trying to nurture the salad mix and arugula for at least another box by covering them with shade cloth and keeping them well watered. Right now our front field is dominated by lots of damp fabric as we try to keep the greens, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage happy in the hot dry weather we’ve suddenly experienced. Ugly, but practical.

The good news about all this heat is that tomatoes, summer squash and cukes are going to be very early this year. We’ve already got good-sized fruit on all those vines, and you will be getting some of them very soon!

Circle M Spring Salad Mix (bagged): So many treats in this mix! Pea shoots, white arugula flowers and spicy pink radish flowers. Curly hot cress. We LOVE mixing up the salads and we hope you like it.

Herb Bouquet: Cilantro, Parsley and Mint (bunched) : This fragrant bouquet has so many amazing flavors in it! You should have no problem identifying them by smell or taste, but we do have pictures below if you need help.  Store in a glass with a half inch of water in the fridge.

Head Lettuce: You’ve each gotten a crisp head of either green Royal Oakleaf or Red Iceberg. Save this head until you’re done with the salad mix because it will last longer. Wash well leaf-by-leaf when you are ready to use because the wind has whipped a fair amount of sand into the heads.

Arugula (bagged): YUM! You either love or hate this and I love it. We had several amazing arugula dishes this past weekend at Merchant – off the square in Madison.  We put some great recipes in the Box 2 Recipes blog post, but you can also just eat arugula like salad, or add it in. We like it on top of pizza, and that’s one of the dishes we had at Merchant, which is a terrific restaurant, by the way – check it  out!

Frisee Endive: This little heads of curly bitter greens are an English favorite not so well known here, but we had a great wilted frisee salad at Lombardino’s in the winter. Try sautéing mushrooms and shallots in olive oil, then pouring the hot mix over a few leaves of the frisee. Salt and pepper it –  then enjoy! These leaves can be added to a raw salad, but they are really best lightly cooked.

Broccoli Raab (bagged): This is now the replacement for broccoli heads in my kitchen. You’ll find this bagged in your box and it looks like a bunch of yellow flowers, green buds and blue-ish leaves with stalks.  Chop up the whole thing and lightly sauté! Wonderful over brown rice, quinoa or faro.

Purple Radish with Greens : These purple radishes are a bit on the hot side, so cooking them isn’t a bad idea to soften and sweeten, if you don’t dig spicy. The greens are VERY tender and nutritious and you should cook and eat them in something. We’ve included a number of recipes this week on the Recipe blog.  Mix with the turnip greens and arugula for a bigger meal.

Salad Turnips with Greens: One of our favorite spring treats here at Circle M. We had a great crew lunch with these this week. Wonderful eaten raw, terrific cooked – these are a sweet cabbage-y  root that can get spicy in the heat.  Some of  these are hot, some not. Use the greens, too.  Great recipe on the recipe post.

Sorrel (bagged): Back by popular demand! We got such a great response to this last week, with so many wonderful shared recipes, we had to pack it again. These bags are a bit smaller, as sorrel is really happier in cool weather and we didn’t have as much to pick this week.

Basil Plants to Grow: These bagged balls of dirt are hardened off and ready for you to plant in your own garden or pot. Keep basil pinched back from the top, and it will make a big bushy clump you can harvest from literally every day all summer. Yay, summer!

Welcome to the Circle M CSA season! We are so delighted to finally be picking and packing (and eating!) some of the veggies we’ve been taking care of for months. Spring always seems to poke along and then it SPRINGS. We are frankly shocked at the leaps our crops have taken in just the past week. The earth is most certainly now saying “Grow” and some of the veggies we planned for this first box have far surpassed the size and yield we optimistically estimated. We are so flush with veggies that are ripe and ready that we even decided to skip the flower bouquets this week – no room for them, sorry!  Not that you won’t see flowers in the box. We love edible blooms here at Circle M and you’ll see lots of them this week, from purple chive blossoms to yellow brassicas in the Asian Braising Mix and sunny sprouted Broccoli Raab. Combine them with the greens raw or cooked and enjoy.

A few notes on the style of our CSA program, should you be one of our new members.  Our veggies are “field clean” and will look lovely when they come to you, but our goal in the wash station here is really to remove ambient heat and not so much to get them to you in table-ready condition.  So DO WASH YOUR VEGGIES, but hold off until you are ready to eat them. They’ll stay longer that way. Most of our vegetables require refrigeration to stay fresh – they’ve been refrigerated here from the moment they left the washtub, and you should continue that. Most last longer when covered in plastic. We will give you special instructions on things that don’t want plastic or cold storage.

You should get enough information through this In The Box Harvest List to help you identify the more unusual selections, but we really encourage you to rely on TASTING and SMELLING the raw veggies rather than simply going by our descriptions to identify them.  We will put as many pictures on the web as we have time for, but in the end, your own perception is going to be your best guide for how to use your produce. Have fun, be bold, take chances and trust yourself!

We will include a recipe or two each box on the paper harvest list, but we put a lot more info up on the website because we have room to wax poetic. Visit circlemfarm.com for each box. Better yet, share your own discoveries with the CSA community on the facebook page. If you like pictures, we’ve got our recipes posted at the new Farmer Kriss Pinterest page, too.

Oh, and hey! It was great to see so many of you at our Lambs and Lettuces Farm Festival this weekend. We had a blast and, most importantly, got to meet lots of you face to face. If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry, there will be more opportunities. We are going to host more fancy flea market sales here this summer, and run a monthly Cooking Class with Chef Tom Ponick who taught us to make spring rolls and lettuce wraps this weekend.  We’ll wrap up the season with our Homestead Harvest Festival in October. But we hope to see you tomorrow at your delivery site, too.

Salad Mix (bagged): This robust selection of early lettuce varieties is just about ready to eat. Give it another wash in very cold water (soaking in the sink is better then rinsing under a faucet) and spin out just before you are ready to eat. This way, the greens should last for weeks in the fridge. You can probably tell already that we have no interest in boring greens here at Circle M! This salad mix also includes some Curly Cress – which is a land-based type of watercress, and tastes just like it. So if you don’t like watercress, just pick the curly stalks out and give it to a friend who will love you for it. The best treat of all is on the top of the mix – succulent PEA SHOOTS! Let us know how the amount of salad we pack in the box this week works for you.

Asian Braising Mix (bagged): A gorgeous blend of Asian brassicas intended to mix with your salad and eat raw or to chop and sauté lightly. You will see yellow flowers, purple stalks and all manner of smooth and frizzy leaves. Some are hot and spicy (purple mustard and mizuna) and others are tender and sweet (baby bok choy and baby napa cabbage). We have been adding this raw to our lunch crew salad, but for dinner, we also chop the whole mix into 1-inch pieces, then lightly sautée in coconut oil with a splash of siracha. When the greens are soft we add toasted sesame seeds and some coconut milk to make a quick sauce, then eat the whole thing over brown rice. Superb!

Head Lettuce: The Full Shares have a large head of crisp green Royal Oakleaf Lettuce. The Shorties have a dramatic little head of Mayan Jaguar.

Sorrel (bunched): Oh, these lovely lance-shaped leaves hold a secret explosion of flavor you don’t expect from something that looks like lettuce. Taste and see. This English spring favorite is “the cabbage patch kid of the garden,” as my friend JD used to say. Try some of the recipes we’ve provided in the Box 1 Recipes Post.

Spinach (bagged): These dark-green leaves are just as good raw as cooked, if not better.  We encourage you not to throw away the stems – we find them to be the sweetest part of the plant.

Chive Blossoms (bunched): Use the chive blossoms whole in tempura, or pull the bulblets from the flower and garnish a salad or omelet. Snip the leaves into tiny bits of onion flavor to grace any dish. The flower stalks themselves are tough at the bottom, so test for tenderness before you use in a dish.  We love these floating on sorrel soup!

Broccoli Raab (bunched): Our new family favorite vegetable. In recent years, various excellent “Broccoli Raab,” “Broccolini,” “Rapini” and “Sprouting Broccoli” dishes have appeared on the menus of Madison restaurants. We had an amazing Raab dish at Lombardino’s for Mother’s Day and another great Broccolini appetizer at Eno Vino this spring.  But we like this veggie because it not only tastes and looks great – flowers! – but it’s the easiest thing in the world to prepare. Simply rinse the whole stalk in a sink full of cold water, then saute whole or chop everything into bite-size pieces. You will use stalk, leaves, buds and flower all together, to great effect, trust me!

Lovage (bunched): Lovage is a well-loved ancient herb little known here in America. A perennial celery, we think it smells like a cross between celery and nutmeg. We’ve found you some recipes, but use this anywhere you’d use celery – which won’t be available grown locally til much later in the summer. I like to rub my hands in it and smell them throughout the day. Both leaves and stalks can be chopped and added to soups, dips, salads and sautees.

French Breakfast Radish (bunched): These rambunctious roots got going in our greenhouse months ago, and are now literally jumping out of the ground. The few hot days we have had have encouraged them to be spicy, and to form some hollow bits inside. At this size, consider cooking them (Try the Braised Radishes with Sorrel recipe) to sweeten and soften the flesh and mitigate the heat.  And by the way – radish greens are delicious and these are very tender. Save them for a soup, a stir-fry, or braise them along with the roots.  As always, our favorite way to enjoy radishes is sliced thin and laid on a buttered slice of baguette. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Or try the recipe we posted on the facebook page for Cinnamon and Sugar Radish Chips!

Baby Leeks: These over-wintered leeks are the last of our planting from 2012.  Small and tender – you can use them like scallions.

Rhubarb: The crew here had so much fun picking the stalks and slicing off the poisonous leaves. Who wouldn’t be happy elbow-deep in fragrant ruby-colored rhubarb? Do share with us your favorite recipes, and try the amazing Rhubarb Caramel Cake recipe we shared with you.

Tomatoes to Plant: We like to give lots of plants our to our members, and some of you have already come and gathered up lots of our extras to pop into your gardens.  This week we have little plants of Cherry and Paste tomatoes in the box for you. Plant them now and you could have tomatoes to eat fresh every day. Nothing, not even a CSA share, can rival the taste of a tomato picked and eaten immediately. Find a spot for just these two.

Happy First CSA Day! We are so excited to be finally jumping into the garden season and hope you have as much fun opening the boxes as we had packing them. Packing veggie boxes is really, really fun – you should come over and join us some time. We have a great crew, some speakers set up in the barn to stick in an IPod, and lots of pretty colorful vegetables to fit into the box like a puzzle.

This week’s box is brought to you by the color Purple! Purple chives, purple bouquets and lots of purple brassicas in the Asian Braising Mix. Of course, the deep red rhubarb is a stand-out in the box, as well. We love edible flowers here at Circle M, and you’ve got lots of them to experiment with this week. Combine them with the greens raw or cooked and enjoy.

A few notes on the style of our CSA program, should you be one of our new members.  Our veggies are “field clean” and will look lovely when they come to you, but our goal in the wash station here is really to remove ambient heat and not so much to get them to you in table-ready condition. DO WASH YOUR VEGGIES, but hold off until you are ready to eat them. They’ll stay longer that way. Most of our vegetables require refrigeration to stay fresh – they’ve been refrigerated here from the moment they left the washtub, and you should continue that. Most last longer when covered in plastic. We will give you special instructions on things that don’t want plastic or cold storage.

You should get enough information through this In The Box Harvest List to help you identify the more unusual selections, but we really encourage you to rely on TASTING and SMELLING the raw veggies rather than simply going by our descriptions to identify them.  We will put as many pictures on the web as we have time for, but in the end, your own perception is going to be your best guide for how to use your produce. Have fun, be bold, take chances and trust yourself!

We will include a recipe or two each box on the paper harvest list, but we put a lot more info up on the website because we have room to wax poetic. Visit circlemfarm.com for each box. Better yet, share your own discoveries with the CSA community on the facebook page. If you like pictures, we’ve got our recipes posted at the Farmer Kriss Pinterest page, too:

Salad Mix (bagged): This robust selection of early lettuce varieties is just about ready to eat. Give it another wash in very cold water (soaking in the sink is better then rinsing under a faucet) and spin out just before you are ready to eat. This way, the greens should last for weeks in the fridge. You can probably tell already that we have no interest in boring greens here at Circle M! This salad mix also includes some Curly Cress – which is a land-based type of watercress, and tastes just like it. So if you don’t like watercress, just pick the curly stalks out and give it to a friend who will love you for it. The best treat of all is on the top of the mix – succulent PEA SHOOTS! Let us know how the amount of salad we pack in the box this week works for you.

Asian Braising Mix (bagged): A gorgeous blend of Asian brassicas intended to mix with your salad and eat raw or to chop and sauté lightly. You will see yellow flowers, purple stalks and all manner of smooth and frizzy leaves. Some are hot and spicy (purple mustard and mizuna) and others are tender and sweet (baby bok choy and baby napa cabbage). We have been adding this raw to our lunch crew salad, but for dinner, we also chop the whole mix into 1-inch pieces, then lightly sautée in coconut oil with a splash of siracha. When the greens are soft we add toasted sesame seeds and some coconut milk to make a quick sauce, then eat the whole thing over brown rice. Superb!

Head Lettuce: The Full Shares have a large head of crisp green Royal Oakleaf Lettuce. The Shorties have a dramatic little head of Mayan Jaguar.

Sorrel (bunched): Oh, these lovely lance-shaped leaves hold a secret explosion of flavor you don’t expect from something that looks like lettuce. Taste and see. This English spring favorite is “the cabbage patch kid of the garden,” as my friend JD used to say. Try some of the recipes we’ve provided in the Box 1 Recipes Post.

Spinach (bagged): These dark-green leaves are just as good raw as cooked, if not better.  We encourage you not to throw away the stems – we find them to be the sweetest part of the plant.

Chive Blossoms (bunched): Use the chive blossoms whole in tempura, or pull the bulblets from the flower and garnish a salad or omelet. Snip the leaves into tiny bits of onion flavor to grace any dish. The flower stalks themselves are tough at the bottom, so test for tenderness before you use in a dish.  We love these floating on sorrel soup!

Lovage (bunched): Lovage is a well-loved ancient herb little known here in America. A perennial celery, we think it smells like a cross between celery and nutmeg. We’ve found you some recipes, but use this anywhere you’d use celery – which won’t be available grown locally til much later in the summer. I like to rub my hands in it and smell them throughout the day. Both leaves and stalks can be chopped and added to soups, dips, salads and sautees.

French Breakfast Radish (bunched): These rambunctious roots got going in our greenhouse months ago, and are now literally jumping out of the ground. The few hot days we have had have encouraged them to be spicy, and to form some hollow bits inside. At this size, consider cooking them (Try the Braised Radishes with Sorrel recipe) to sweeten and soften the flesh and mitigate the heat.  And by the way – radish greens are delicious and these are very tender. Save them for a soup, a stir-fry, or braise them along with the roots.  As always, our favorite way to enjoy radishes is sliced thin and laid on a buttered slice of baguette. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Or try the recipe we posted on the facebook page for Cinnamon and Sugar Radish Chips!

Baby Leeks: These over-wintered leeks are the last of our planting from 2012.  Small and tender – you can use them like scallions.

Rhubarb: The crew here had so much fun picking the stalks and slicing off the poisonous leaves. Who wouldn’t be happy elbow-deep in fragrant ruby-colored rhubarb? Do share with us your favorite recipes, and try the amazing Rhubarb Caramel Cake recipe we shared with you.

Flower Bouquet: We can’t always pack a bouquet for you (sometimes the box is too full or the flowers too scarce or beat up)  but we sure like to do it!  We are pleased to bring you purple Baptista ( a prairie native pea) , purple Iris and maroon Ninebark  this week.

Tomatoes to Plant: We like to give lots of plants our to our members, and some of you have already come and gathered up lots of our extras to pop into your gardens.  This week we have little plants of Cherry and Paste tomatoes in the box for you. Plant them now and you could have tomatoes to eat fresh every day. Nothing, not even a CSA share, can rival the taste of a tomato picked and eaten immediately. Find a spot for just these two.