What are you cooking up for the holidays? What are your family favorites? So often food is at the center of our holidays, birthdays, summer picnics…. A favorite dish is tied to a favorite season which ties everything back to memories.
I know for our family the one thing that gets made every year is pumpkin roles. Flour everywhere, every cookie sheet is filled with pumpkin bread waiting to be rolled up in kitchen towels and then filled with a healthy version of cream cheese filling. They are beautiful and tasty.
Roots and Fruit:
This week we are building boxes filled with fruit and roots. Not really, but we are purposely omitting lettuce from the boxes of good. The lettuce world is sorting out the premature move to Arizona and Southern California from Mid California.
Every fall produce starts to head back down I-5 as the local produce season starts to wind down and more produce is sourced from Oregon and Northern California and then Mid California and finally down to Southern California, Arizona and Mexico. Of course, there is some local produce available year-round, but the weather for growing fresh crops is primarily down south. About mid-May fresh produce begins its return to the Northwest, reversing its course and comes back up the I-5 Corridor until we are in full production in the Northwest again. We are so blessed to have so much incredible fresh produce available year-round and much of it local.
The recent food warning on Romaine lettuce, that has since been lifted, caused a wrinkle in production. Most of the Romaine lettuce had been growing in Mid California regions and was nearing its growing cycle when the CDC issued its warning. So, the lettuce growers, basically, tilled in a lot of good food and shifted to Southern California a little earlier than was planned for. Which has caused a gap in production of leafy greens since Southern California and Arizona were not quite ready to harvest.
The long and short of it is. Lettuce is scarce and expensive, so I decided to build a menu around roasted vegetables and a Dill, cucumber, tomato salad recipe. And by next week, lettuce will be more reasonably priced and back in the menus.
While I was doing some research on dill for our plant powerhouse feature, we do weekly, I was like, “WOW, I should eat Dill every week”. Dill is definitely an amazing herb and offers so much healing potential from tying up free radicals to aiding digestion. I might even add it to my list of crops to grow for next year!
Enjoy,
Your farmer and health advocate
Tristan
