Delicious Driftless  Fare
October 4th and 5th
Mineral Point, WI & Dodgeville, WI
This is the first ever local food fair in our neighborhood, and we’re excited to be a part of it! Farmer Kriss will be mediating a movie discussion in Mineral Point on Friday night the 4th, and Circle M will be serving veggie samples at a booth on Saturday.  Also, Kriss’s bluegrass band, MooGrass, will be playing on Saturday at noon! Better yet, there is an old-time  Potluck and Square dance that evening. 

Oct 4th @ Mineral Point Opera House (139 High Street, Mineral Point)
6pm: Meet the authors of Super Snacks for Super Kids
7pm: FREE screening of documentary Hungry for Change
9pm: Wine and Cheese Reception at Grey Dog Deli, panel with local farmers
Oct 5th @ Folklore Village (3210 Cty Rd BB, Dodgeville)
12 to 6pm: Delicious Driftless Fare with vendors and live music
1pm: Keynote Speaker Steven Deller, UW Madison Professor Ag and Econ
6pm: Potluck and Barn Dance ($7 with a dish, $10 without)

Warm and Wooly Fall Farm Festival
Saturday, October 19th
Circle M Farm (1784 County Rd. H, Blanchardville, WI 53516)
This is our annual fall farm open house – we’ll be here from noon til night playing with wool, building bonfires and touring the farm to eat veggies and pet animals. The evening will culminate with a huge potluck dinner at 6pm and live bluegrass music at 7pm. Smores all night. Meet your farmers and bring friends, blankets, chairs and a dish to pass!

Fall is such a delightful time to live on a farm. The mornings are brisk, the afternoons temperate, the harvest endless and the food incredible. If you can look past the weeds that inevitably encroach as the season progresses, the gardens are lovely with colorful fruit and seedheads of various sorts, while the fields beyond our boundaries are ripe and golden with corn, soy and hay. We just love it.

You can join us, if you like, in the work and the feast. Monday through Friday we eat at noon, and if you want to come chip in on the harvest some morning, we'd love to share our riotous buffet of food with you. Of course, we've given you a lot to play with at home, this week, too. Here's what's in the box:

Head Lettuce - At last some crisp fall head lettuce. We love our salad mix, but the sudden change to the sturdier heads is always a welcome surprise. Yum! Be sure to pull these apart and wash them well, leaf by leaf, before eating. They are very sandy due to that pounding rain last week.

Nasturtium Flowers and Leaves - For some members, we know this bag is the highlight of the season. Others of you might not know what to do with these but we encourage you to try these peppery-radish-ish treats in a salad or as a stand-alone appetizer. Mix some goat or cream cheese with chives and pepper, spread lightly on a leaf and top with a flower - enjoy and impress your dinner guests! Chefs most often use these to garnish fish or soup, so that's an option, too. These were originally grown in South America as a salad vine - not as the flower bed edging we see here!

Tomatoes - This could be the end for our tomatoes, depending on how the nights go here in the next week, so enjoy the last bite of summer!

Eggplant - DO roast these. We've had them roasted in all kinds of dishes this week - including this morning for breakfast as a base for a poached egg. Lots of ideas on the Farmer Kriss Pinterest Page! If you don't have time to eat them, roast them and freeze the flesh to make babaganoush later.

Peppers - Reds of all sorts and lovely huge bells. Little hot jalapenos. The fat horn-shaped reds have sweet flesh and spicy seeds - so watch out for that!

Cucumbers - We had a great salad dish featuring cucumbers and beef at Madison's wonderful Lao-Laan Xang Atwood recently. Don't be afraid to combine your cukes with warm ingredients.

Herb Bag: Chives, Celery/Lovage and Basil

Collards - Oh, hooray! The collards are finally beefy enough to cook them Southern-style with a tomato broth and some ham. Luscious on a chilly night. See a great Indian Spiced Collard dish on the Box 9 recipe blog page.

Kohlrabi - Really one of my favorite veggies of the year. Looks awesome in the garden - like a vegetable asteroid from space - and tastes great on the plate. I tend to eat these like apples, right in the field, but we grew the Gigante variety this year, which gives us more to work with in the kitchen. Today we had Chili-Spiced Kohlrabi fries for lunch and they were truly terrific. Sweet! New to me this year - roasted and sprinkled with a tiny bit of Gruyere and pepper and salt. A superlative side dish.

Beets - Yay! Beet time! We don't grow beets for the spring because we love love love the sweetness the fall temperatures impart to the earthy flesh. These are good all kinda ways - and terrific if you are a juicer - but my personal favorite is roasting, dicing, and having in a room-temperature salad.

White and Blue Potatoes - These All Blues make a great boiling potato and the white Kennebecs are terrific for frying or baking.

Gourd - One pretty gourd, courtesy of our friends at Barham Flower Garden. Thanks, Kim and Roberta!

Save The Dates! Fall is party season out here in the country. The leaves are gorgeous, the harvest is sweet and colorful and the temperature is just perfect for a drive and a day out in the fields and forests. We’ve got a couple of events in the next month that we’d like to invite you to attend. 

Delicious Driftless  Fare
October 4th and 5th
Mineral Point, WI & Dodgeville, WI
This is the first ever local food fair in our neighborhood, and we’re excited to be a part of it! Farmer Kriss will be mediating a movie discussion in Mineral Point on Friday night the 4th, and Circle M will be serving veggie samples at a booth on Saturday.  Also, Kriss’s bluegrass band, MooGrass, will be playing on Saturday at noon! Better yet, there is an old-time  Potluck and Square dance that evening. 

Oct 4th @ Mineral Point Opera House (139 High Street, Mineral Point)
6pm: Meet the authors of Super Snacks for Super Kids
7pm: FREE screening of documentary Hungry for Change
9pm: Wine and Cheese Reception at Grey Dog Deli, panel with local farmers
Oct 5th @ Folklore Village (3210 Cty Rd BB, Dodgeville)
12 to 6pm: Delicious Driftless Fare with vendors and live music
1pm: Keynote Speaker Steven Deller, UW Madison Professor Ag and Econ
6pm: Potluck and Barn Dance ($7 with a dish, $10 without)

Warm and Wooly Fall Farm Festival
Saturday, October 19th
Circle M Farm (1784 County Rd. H, Blanchardville, WI 53516)
This is our annual fall farm open house – we’ll be here from noon til night playing with wool, building bonfires and touring the farm to eat veggies and pet animals. The evening will culminate with a huge potluck dinner at 6pm and live bluegrass music at 7pm. Smores all night. Meet your farmers and bring friends, blankets, chairs and a dish to pass!

Brrrrr.  The mornings now are very chilly here in the valley, and while the cooler temps make the afternoons glorious, it is quite hard to make the hands work properly before 10am. Especially when the task is washing beets in cold water tubs! So worth it, though, to finally be harvesting these hearty fall crops. Beets, potatoes and thick crunchy collards! So crisp and delicious, so wonderful in warm dishes on nippy evenings.

Basil – The leaves sustained some damage in the cool nights this past week, so use them quickly before they get soft. Basil is not happy below 50 degrees, so this could be it!

Kriss’ Kick-@$$ Summer Salad Mix – We’ve assembled a crisp and assertive blend this week, with lettuce greens layered with spicy arugula, purple mizuna and peppery nasturtium blossoms. If you don’t want a spicy salad, you can pull those things off the top and use them sautéed. It will soften their bite.

Tomatoes – These are slowing down a bit. Enjoy in combination with the collards, the potatoes, the eggplant for a rich stew.

Eggplant – We have so enjoyed roasted eggplant, peppers and onions dressed up with roasted tomatoes and a bit of goat cheese this chilly week. Do give the recipes a try – you can find it on the Box 8 Recipe Blog and on Pinterest.

Peppers -  More turn red everyday. You mostly have sweet peppers, but the jalapeno shapes are a bit spicy, and the fat long reds have very spicy seeds.

Cucumbers - Now we've got the smooth English cucumbers coming on. Some of you will have these, some will have the traditional lumpy type.

Collards – At last, these leaves are beefy enough to make a rich Southerns stew. See the Box 8 Recipe Blog and the Farmer Kriss Pinterest Page for ideas.

String Beans (Full Shares Only)

Beets – I’ve been watching the beets push themselves up out of our sandy soil for weeks now, but I just didn’t feel like eating them.  So I didn’t pack them for you either. But now suddenly, the weather has shifted and I feel like beets! Hope you do too. Wonderful roasted, or lightly steamed. We like them rather al dente, before they get mushy. Makes chunky sea salt and balsamic vinegar into heavenly nectar. Don't toss the greens! They are beautiful right now and healthy! Use them in any dish you'd use kale, collards, swiss chard or spinach. They taste just like Swiss Chard but they are a bit beefier and require cooking.

Potatoes – These lovely All Blue and nutty, dry Kennebec potatoes are great for frying or browning.

Herb Bags: Chives and Lovage – You might remember Lovage from the spring shares. It’s our perennial celery and since our spring-planted traditional celery still isn’t big enough to cut, we feel lucky that these perennial plants looks so nice in the herb beds. Chop and use where you’d use celery  - stems and leaves are all good to eat.

Seems like every recipe I make these days takes forever.  And you know what?  I’m OK with that.  Cooking with all the ingredients we have available to us this time of year is a tremendous luxury, and I hope you can make some time to enjoy it this week. I spent about 2 hours making Ratatouille this weekend and it was quite lovely – especially with a little glass of wine on the table.  Like a vacation in my own kitchen.  If I'm not picking veggies, I'm cooking veggies or I'm reading cookbooks with gorgeous pictures of recipes.  What a wonderful life!  This week I’m especially excited to have a date with my new book, The Art of Russian Cuisine by Anne Volokh, and eat my way through a few of the tomato zakuskis (appetizers).  I'll practice and be able to make some of these to serve you at these upcoming events!

Fall is party season out here in the country. The leaves are gorgeous, the harvest is sweet and colorful and the temperature is just perfect for a drive and a day out in the fields and forests. We’ve got a couple of events in the next month that we’d like to invite you to attend. 

Delicious Driftless  Fare
October 4th and 5th
Mineral Point, WI & Dodgeville, WI
This is the first ever local food fair in our neighborhood, and we’re excited to be a part of it! Farmer Kriss will be mediating a movie discussion in Mineral Point on Friday night the 4th, and Circle M will be serving veggie samples at a booth on Saturday.  Also, Kriss’s bluegrass band, MooGrass, will be playing on Saturday at noon! Better yet, there is an old-time  Potluck and Square dance that evening. 

Oct 4th @ Mineral Point Opera House (139 High Street, Mineral Point)
6pm: Meet the authors of Super Snacks for Super Kids
7pm: FREE screening of documentary Hungry for Change
9pm: Wine and Cheese Reception at Grey Dog Deli, panel with local farmers
Oct 5th @ Folklore Village (3210 Cty Rd BB, Dodgeville)
12 to 6pm: Delicious Driftless Fare with vendors and live music
1pm: Keynote Speaker Steven Deller, UW Madison Professor Ag and Econ
6pm: Potluck and Barn Dance ($7 with a dish, $10 without)

Warm and Wooly Fall Farm Festival
Saturday, October 19th
Circle M Farm (1784 County Rd. H, Blanchardville, WI 53516)
This is our annual fall farm open house – we’ll be here from noon til night playing with wool, building bonfires and touring the farm to eat veggies and pet animals. The evening will culminate with a huge potluck dinner at 6pm and live bluegrass music at 7pm. Smores all night. Meet your farmers and bring friends, blankets, chairs and a dish to pass! 

Basil – We can’t get enough of this in pesto, and now is the time of year when we start to freeze the little bits left over from each meal so we’ll have some in winter. Pesto freezes great, though basil by itself does not. This could be the last week for basil, if the temps really do dip into the 40s this next week!

Kriss’ Kick-@$$ Summer Salad Mix – I don’t want to offend you, but this is a really great, and powerfully flavored mix this week. We’ve got your tender lettuce greens, and on top we’ve layered some spicy arugula and some peppery nasturtium blossoms. That’s right, they aren’t just for looks! They pack a powerful flavor punch of their own. If you are up for it, just mix it all together (and add our purple braising mix to boot!), but if you like a milder salad, just pull the arugula and nasturtiums off the top and use to garnish other dishes.

Purple Braising Mix – Yay! Braising mix is back. This spicy-sweet blend of sautéing greens is a mix of Red Mizuna and Purple Peacock Broccoli, an Asian sprouting broccoli that is just gorgeous in the garden and was a big hit with our Soil Sisters Farm Tour visitors this weekend. Lightly sauté in coconut oil with a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce, or if you really like to spice it up, chop and add to your salad.

Tomatoes -  This absolutely must be the peak of the year’s tomato harvest, but it seems I’ve been saying that every week for a while now. You’ve got all sorts of heirloom slicers – from the magical green Aunt Ruby’s German to the lovely orange, pinks and yellows. You’ve got the orange Banana, striped Vilms and red Federle pastes. And in your cherry boxes, you’ve got some beautiful cascades of ripe and ripening Currant tomatoes.

Eggplant – O my! We’ve been sooo enjoying roasted and grilled eggplant this year. If you haven’t already tried the Babaganoush, do! So wonderful on pita, chips, even cucumber slices.

Peppers – Finally some reds! Our hands-down favorite pepper for flavor is the long, skinny, twisty, red Jimmy Nardello fryers. Try this sliced thin and sautéed with onions, or roast in the oven with eggplant.

Cucumber

Mixed Kale – Are you sick of kale yet? We’ve been packing it for weeks and we keep getting wonderful feedback, so we keep putting it in the box. It continues to be sweet and crisp and we have enjoyed it in so many raw and cooked combinations this summer.

Herb Bag: Oregano and Parsley

String Beans – Nothing says summer like a string bean.

All-Red and All-Blue Potatoes

Garlic

The stars of this week's shares are Paste Tomatoes. We primarily grow juicy heirloom slicers here at Circle M, but we do plant a fair amount of oblong paste or Roma tomatoes for those who like to make sauce. And this is the moment to do it! All of our paste varieties are perfect at once, right now, as if the earth were saying, "Fall is coming! Time to save some sunny tomato goodness to use this winter!" They've stopped putting energy into juice, and everything they've got is going into their pulpy flesh. You don't have to cook them down much to get a lovely thick sauce. We've given you lots of paste recipes links on the Box 7 Recipe Blog and there are even more on the Farmer Kriss pinterest page. Have fun and fill your house with the delicious smell of summer in a bottle.

Basil: Now these plants are really rolling! DO try the Chocolate Basil Cake. It is a perennial favorite with our members, and with us! You have enough here to make that and pesto this week. As usual, store basil in the bag, outside of the fridge.

Tomatoes: Wowza, what a year for tomatoes! You’ve got a mix of pink Brandywine and Big Rainbow slicers, Early Girl small slicers, Big Beef giant slicers, sweet Green Zebras, and a mix of SunGold and Juliets in your cherry boxes. We’ll take the plastic boxes back, by the way! But most importantly, you've got the pastes: striped Vilms, red Federal and orange Banana. Our chefs love these for Italian dishes, and you will, too.

Spinach: First picking of this! Yummy! Eat as your fresh salad this week and save the cooking for later in the fall.

Eggplant: A banner year for eggplant, too! This is the year to make babaganoush on the grill, if you haven’t before. Roasting eggplant yields an unbelievably creamy and flavorful flesh.

Zucchini and Summer Squash (Full Boxes Only): This may be the last week for these, but celebrate their flavor this week the way they would in Provence with Ratatouille! Or make up the amazing Zucchini Chocolate Cake recipe we have on the Farmer Kriss Pinterest Page.

Purple and Green String Beans: First picking of these. Delish. Don’t worry, they turn green when cooked – use just like a regular string bean.

Peppers: Sweet Green and Purple Bells, Yellow Bananas, Red Jimmy Nardello sweet fryers and spicy Jalapenos.

Cucumber (Shorties Only): Still going strong, still sweet and crisp. We sliced these this week and dipped them in Babaganoush.

Herb Bag: Oregano, Sage, Parsley

Mixed Kale: Now is the time to make Kale Chips!!!! We polished off a big bowl of these at lunch today in about 3 minutes. So addictive. We put several recipes up at the Farmer Kriss pinterest page, but the basic idea is: heat oven to 350. Rip up the curliest kale leaves in your bunch and spray with olive oil. Toss with salt and pepper. Bake on a cookie sheet for 20 minutes or until crispy.

All Red and All Blue Potatoes: These potatoes are as good as they look. Yum! It’s a good week to make Zuppa Toscano. See the recipe at the Box 7 Recipe Blog .

Garlic: Cured and ready to store in the pantry, should you not use it up in the next week.