Newsletter — September 25, 2017

Dear Friends,
This week you are getting beans, white and yellow cooking onions, garlic, gold beets, cauliflower, lemon cucumbers, red bell peppers, a specialty pepper called Mosco, red anaheim, yellow, black, Cherokee Purple, Black Velvet and Roma tomatoes, muskmelon and orange flesh honeydew. Mosco was developed in 1995 in Pueblo and was tested by the CSU Arkansas Valley Research Station from 1999 to 2004 before it was released for sale. It is a chili style pepper with thick walls which make it great for grilling. Mild to medium hot, this chili can be used just like an anaheim. Skins need to be removed before
eating begins. See red anaheim for details. Red anaheim peppers tend to be sweeter than their green counterpart. But they can still have that sense of heat after the sweet. Easy to grill, just place under your broiler until they turn brown & start to bubble.

Newsworthy: Recent studies have shown that produce with scabs, marks, bumps and soft spots may actually be healthier for us. When plants are stressed by weather, insects or disease, they produce more of the antioxidants that unleash the cell protective functions in our bodies when we eat them. Do you realize that 25% of our produce doesn’t make it out of the fields because of those scabs, marks, bumps and soft spots?
Did you know that another 25% doesn’t make it to supermarkets because it does not meet the size, shape and color requirements of these stores? Makes you think a little bit about these stupid standards and how many people could be fed if it wasn’t all thrown away….which is what happens to it when it does not meet inspection.

2017 Survey: We cannot make this the best CSA without input from you. On the back of this newsletter I am placing a survey I would like everyone to fill out. It is important to me to know small details about your household so we can compare what you say about your share with the size of your household. Thank you in advance for taking the time to do this for us! We want everyone to be happy with their farm and we can’t make improvements without input from you!!! Your thoughts and comments are important and we read each and every evaluation.

Please help us improve! Take our online end of year survey:

2017 Summer Survey for Monroe Organic Farms, llc

You can also download a PDF copy of the survey here:

Sept_25___Survey

Chili Relleno Casserole

Butter or oil a 9×13 pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Chop 4-6 roasted anaheim peppers and arrange in bottom of pan.
Add 2lbs shredded Colby-Jack to the top of the peppers.
Beat 10 eggs with 1 tsp salt, 4 Tb flour and 1 ½ small cans evaporated milk.
Bake 45 minutes or until a knife come out clean.
Adaptions: I have mixed the peppers with diced cooked potatoes and cooked sausage.
Delicious!!!

Please help us improve! Take our online end of year survey:

2017 Summer Survey for Monroe Organic Farms, llc

You can also download a PDF copy of the survey here:

Sept_25___Survey

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Newsletter – September 19, 2017

Dear Friends of the Farm;

This is week 14 out of an 18 week season. You are getting red potatoes, Walla Walla onions, carrots, purple cauliflower, red peppers, yellow peppers, green basil, red tomatoes, specialty tomatoes, muskmelon and orange honeydew.

Fruit: I’m sorry I forgot to tell you last week apples were coming…completely forgot! That is the last of the fruit this year. It came in large quantities because of the horrendous year they are having. If they had given us smaller quantities, they would not have been able to bring it again. When the crop was ready to pick, we had to take what we could get or not get very much of anything! Sometimes the fruit was ripe and ready to eat and had to be refrigerated immediately and sometimes it could sit and continue to ripen for three or four days. But at least we got it!!

Honey: Those of you who get monthly deliveries of honey will be getting that this week.

Do you remember? Can you believe how fast this summer has gone by?! Amazing how time just seems to slip away from us. The older you get, they faster time vanishes too. Do you remember what you were doing four & five years ago? 2012 was one of the hottest summers on record. With three straight weeks of over 100 degree heat and three months in the 90’s, the farmers had used up all the water in most of the reservoirs. After that dry summer and no snow during the winter, we didn’t think we would have any water to farm with the following year. We made arrangements with the city of Greeley to use city water and drip irrigation on five acres of land. The one and only snowstorm we got was a huge one that hit the Denver Metro area and Front Range in late March. It dropped a whopping three feet of snow in the Metro area and 8 feet all along the upper Front Range. The farm received around 6 to 8 inches of snow during that storm and all that snow melt-off filled our reservoirs. As devastating that storm was to the trees that had budded out, nothing compared to the 500 year storm that hit in September of 2013 that flooded just about every city along the Front Range. Those of you who were in the area at the time will never forget what happened. Some cities received anywhere from 15 to 24 inches of rain in a three or four days. Streets became rivers and houses & basements were flooded. The city of Lyons because an island! Helicopters had to rescue all the residents!

I guess we should all stop what we are doing now & then and appreciate what we have and what we are doing because Mother Nature has a way of slapping us in the face to give us a wake-up call. It’s up to us to appreciate all the little things in life that makes life easy and fun. Slow down and look around you. What is it that you appreciate today?

Jacquie, Jerry, Kyle and Sam

Smashed Potatoes

2# potatoes, no larger than 3X3 (cut if necessary), boiled or baked, grease a baking pan & arrange potatoes. Use a masher to squash to about half the size. If using different size potatoes, squash all potatoes to about the same width. Melt 3Tb butter with 4 crushed & diced garlic and 1 Tb chopped fresh parsley (or 1 ½ tsp dry); drizzle over potatoes. Broil or grill until golden and crispy. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese to taste and heat until cheese is melted. Sprinkle with extra parsley if desired & pass around a salt shaker if needed!

Newsletter – September 12, 2017

Hi Everyone!

It is week 13 of an 18 week season and you are getting: red potatoes, red onions, red beets, daikon radish, lemon cucumbers, purple & red peppers, pablano peppers, green beans, orange honeydew and tomatoes; including red beefsteak, yellow, Cherokee Purple, Black Beauty, and Terra Cotta.

The Terra Cotta tomato is a unique tomato that has an orange tinge to it with green mixed throughout. Its flavor can be fruity to outrageously acidic! It’s the acidity that gives a tomato its flavor. Compare the flavor of your low acid yellow tomato to the high acid of the other three and you can really see the difference! Our regular beefsteak red tomato has an acid content in the middle range.

The orange flesh honeydew is absolutely one of my favorites! It has a nice round flavor and very sweet. Honeydew are at their best when you leave them on the counter until they resemble an over inflated rubber ball. They should have a rubbery feel to them. You can eat any of these melons right away, but those that do not have that rubbery feel to them will be firmer inside and the rubbery ones will be soft inside!

Daikon Radishes are a favorite in Asian cooking and is mostly pickled and served as a side dish. An old Chinese proverb says, “Eating pungent radish and drinking hot tea let the starved doctors beg on their knees.” There’s probably some truth to this saying, because radishes are among the most nutritionally loaded yet low-calorie vegetables you can eat. Daikon has the ability to improve digestion, helps relieve indigestion & heartburn, may help improve blood circulation and prevent clots. The juice extracted from raw daikon has been traditionally used to alleviate headaches, fever, swollen gums, hot flashes and it has anti-inflammatory effect on people. Sounds like a super-food to me!!

Office Staff: Dani is having ankle surgery this Wednesday and will not be in the office until next Monday. Please be advised I am not in the office this week either because I have company from California coming Friday and won’t be available until Friday the 22nd. I will try to answer phone messages on the 15th but will not be answering email. (Which everyone should know by now that I do not do very often anyway!)

Do you remember? Telephone booths, party lines, phones you dialed, phones that hung on the wall with 10 foot cord so you could try to find some privacy when talking? Do you remember writing long notes to your friends during a boring lecture instead of texting for five seconds? Talk with your kids tonight and enlighten them on the way telephones used to work!

Colorado Proud Day is September 13th and is a day set aside for everyone to think about where their food comes from and the farmers that produce it. Do you know where your food comes from? Good question to ask most people because they do not! Hug a farmer…they deserve your appreciation!

Pickled Daikon

4 pound each carrots & celery, julienned
½ pound daikon, julienned
1 ½ cups water
¼ cup rice vinegar (I used regular)
2 Tb raw honey

Place everything into a large, wide pan. Bring to a boil and immediately remove from heat. Let sit for at least one hour. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

UPDATED Newsletter – September 4, 2017

Dear Friends of the farm,

This week Jerry made some last minute changes! You are getting Walla Walla onions, garlic, turnips, red cabbage, squash, cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, green & purple bell peppers, basil, beans, red tomatoes, Black Beauty tomatoes, corn, muskmelon and honeydew.

We are now giving out a new honeydew called Banana Melon.  It has salmon
colored flesh with yellow, smooth, rippled skin.  It has a unique flavor
that reminds me of muskmelon and honeydew combined.  It is banana shaped
and some will say it even smells like a banana….though I could not smell
it.  It is an old heirloom seed and somewhat rare.  Please save the seed
by rinsing well, dry it out, then place in an envelope.  Please do not
place in plastic. The seed will mold & we cannot use it.

You are also getting several different heirloom tomatoes such as Cherokee
Purple (same as last week), Golden Globe and Black Beauty.

This is the world’s darkest tomato! It has the same antioxidants as blueberries!  With a thick flesh, it is one of the greatest tasting tomatoes with a savory, earthy taste.  Allow the green spot to turn pink by leaving on your counter.

After examining the fields, the best looking right now is a beautiful red
basil called cinnamon basil.  Has a very nice, slightly spicy taste.

We are out of watermelon for the summer.  Due to the extremely warm temperatures in July, everything came on approximately 3 to 4 weeks early.  So we will be slowly running out of product this month. So enjoy it while it is here!!

Boxes/Bags:  If you remember, at the beginning of the year we asked you to return all boxes & bags including your bean bags.  This means we want your peach boxes!  We want to put tomatoes into them for distribution.

Cards & Letters:  I sure do appreciate all the nice notes members are sending me along with their payments.  It makes us feel like we are doing something right!  We work so hard (and get a little grumpy along the way) and so many hours; well let me just say, thank you for appreciating it!!  It has been an amazing summer full of rich, wonderful goodness…

Jacquie’s Soapbox:  My grandmother (Edith) had a saying:  “If a child hasn’t eaten five pounds of dirt by the time they are 2, they’re not going to be healthy.” After having kids of my own, and seeing other people with their kids today, I’m beginning to see her point!  I dug a huge hole in my back yard and the kids and I would sit in it and play with Matchbox Cars or Tanka Trucks for hours.  Sometimes we would add water to that hole, just for fun!  We had a sand pit under the playhouse and again play in it for hours.  We would make mud pies and have mud fights!  When they got older, we played in the muddy water in the ditches.  None of us wore shoes all summer unless we had too.  (I cannot tell you how many times I had to wash off those two kids with a garden hose before coming into the house!)  We still play in the dirt (literally) every day.  Our kids had a mud volleyball game for their friends a few years back!  As everyone crawled out of the pit, they had mud in their hair, smeared across their faces and of course, on their cloths. Everyone had the best time.

Today, kids appear to be sparkling clean.  I constantly hear parents say, “Don’t get dirty!”  Well why not??  We have to be exposed to the germs in the dirt around us to build up our immune systems. Evidence shows us that if we do this as kids it will help us as adults.  Children raised in homes that are not perfectly clean have fewer allergies as adults.  Hopefully this will inspire you and make you feel much better about going outside to play with your kids instead of cleaning the house this week!  Let’s all get dirty, be healthy and have some fun!  (psst.  We eat produce right out in the field without washing it; a big no-no in food safety today.)  WE LOVE OUR DIRT!!

Curried Vegetables 

1 onion. sliced & quartered
2 carrots, sliced
1 green chili, chopped (or jalapeno for added spice)
1 summer squash, chunked
1 small eggplant, chunked
3 T. oil
1 lg potato, chunked
1 t. cumin seeds
1 cup cauliflower, in pieces
1 t. coriander, turmeric & chili powder
1 bell pepper, chunked
2/3 cup veggie broth
juice from a lime

Heat 1 T. oil in a pan and fry onion, the chili & cumin seeds 2 minutes and set aside in a serving bowl.  Heat 2 T. oil then add potato & fry 3 minutes.  Add cauliflower & carrots and fry 3 minutes.  Add eggplant & squash and fry 3 minutes. (Isn’t this nice and easy so far?)  Stir in spices, add broth, cover and simmer 30 minutes or until veggies are tender.  Add more broth if needed to make a nice consistency.  Finish with the lime juice, cook another couple of minutes and serve!

Winter Share Form

Winter Share Form

Monroe Winter Share pdf

(click above to download – it will take you to a new page, where you will have to click the link again.)