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Fruit This Week:
Pink Lady Apples
A cross between the Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, the Pink Lady is a crisp and juicy apple with a tart finish. Pink skins and a creamy white colored flesh that resists browning makes, this an excellent apple for salads and slicing. Store on your counter out of direct light for 4-5 days. Refrigerate after to maintain crispness.
Warren Pears
This is Frog Hollow Farm’s signature pear and for good reason. Too difficult to grow for most farmers to consider it’s never caught on commercially but Farmer Al has never shied away from putting the time and effort into a fruit that tastes so good. It has a classic European texture, very soft and juicy with a silky sweetness that avoids the typical grittiness found in most pears. Pears are ripe when wrinkled and yielding slightly near the stem. Pears will store well in the fridge once they have reached your optimal ripeness.
Golden Russet Bosc Pears
The Bosc was introduced to the US in 1836 and has also been known as the Kaiser Alexander. The Golden Russet is true to its name with a yellowish- white flesh and a uniformly russet skin. It has the classic Bosc shape of a long elegant neck. Excellent for cooking, the Bosc’s texture holds up very well in pies, tarts, and for poaching.
Seckle Pears
A varietal that pre-dates the Bosc, the Seckel is much smaller in size and finds its origins near Philadelphia in the early 1800s. Also known as sugar pears, the Seckel is green with a dark-red blush or in some cases nearly all red. It’s extremely sweet with almost no acid and its fine flesh is very juicy.
Shinko Asian Pears
The Shinko is a large pear with its round shape slightly flattened. The skin is bronze with brown russeting and its juicy, creamy white flesh has a subtly rich flavor. One of the last pears to pick, it comes off the tree with a butterscotch note to its sweetness. Enjoy these from the counter within 5-7 days.
A NOTE FROM FARMER AL
Dear CSA Members,
I have been reading Michael Pollan’s new book “Cooked” all summer, and loving it. I think is his best book ever, a masterpiece. Pollan’s prem- ise of the book is that the four fundamental elements of Nature, Fire, Water, Air and Earth correspond to the four principal methods humans have devised for cooking, or transforming the basic products of nature, into things good to eat and drink. By cooking we make these natural products better for us in many ways: better taste, more nutritious, more easily digested, longer storage, stimulating sociability, expanding imagination, etc, etc.
My favorite element is earth of course. As a farmer, this is my element. Earth, the soil, is a product of decay, decomposition, transformation and creation. Fermentation is in the realm of earth since it “draws on the same microbial process of destruction and creation at work in the soil” (p394) Consider the things we ferment to produce our favorite foods; vegetables fermented, give us pickles, krauts, sauces and breads. Animals give us salami, prosciutto and cheese. Fruits give us wine and barley gives us beer.
Beer is my favorite example of this transformation of nature to wonder- ful food for us to enjoy and thrive on, because it actually utilizes all four elements in its production: barley is first cooked over a fire, it’s boiled in water, then the fermentation (earth) occurs and finally it’s carbonated by air.
Composting is like cooking. It incorporates all elements of Nature in its transformation of the raw elements (manures, woods, fruit, grass, leaves and food waste) into rich, fertile food for the soil and thence the trees, and thence the fruit. In this way, the farmer becomes the chef of the soil.
