Midwinter is Alive with Flavor and Nutrition!
Welcome to the weeklyish! This week, we look at micgrogreens, make a delicious milk braised pork loin with lots of caramelized onions and garlic that was loosely inspired by a traditional Arista Toscana, and continue our annual review by examining our farm's living capital.
Let's dig in!
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Order Deadlines
| Delivery Option |
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Deadline |
| Home delivery | Thursday |
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Tuesday, 10pm* |
| Pickup @ Culver Farmers' Market | Saturday |
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Thursday, 10pm |
| *Sourdough orders for delivery require an additional 24 hours |
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Microgreens
Do you have any resolutions, plans, or goals that involve eating extremely nutrient dense, immune boosting, beautiful, and delicious food? Then you need to experience microgreens!
Microgreens are young seedlings of vegetable plants, and usually harvested just before they grow their first set of true leaves. They are grown for 7-14 days in soil or a similar medium (unlike sprouts, which are grown for a shorter period of time in an anaerobic environment). Microgreens have the benefits of both the perfect nutrition for a growing baby plant contained in the seed's endosperm, and the creation of new vitamins and enzymes through photosynthesis.
The result? Tiny, colorful, flavorful mini-plants that contain between 4 and 40 times the nutrient density of the mature version of their form. For example, micro-cabbage, in addition to being really colorful and tasty, packs 40 times the vitamin E and 6 times the vitamin C as does mature cabbage.
Until a few years ago, microgreens were only widely available to chefs in high-end restaurants, often used for garnish more than for their flavor and nutritional value. But, following the 2012 publication of a study conducted at the University of Maryland, their prominence in the local food movement began to soar.
Hole in the Woods Farm produces a wide variety of microgreens year 'round. During in-person markets, we cut to order, harvesting while you wait: the freshest harvest possible! For delivery and pre-order, we offer several individual varieties, as well as two mixes, which vary a little each week.
Our regular mix is the most popular selection, followed by pea shoots, micro-radishes, adventurous mix, sunflower shoots, and micro-arugula. Chad's favorites are micro-leeks, shungiku, and purple cabbage. Leeks are sold as a still-growing square. Their onion-like flavor and beautiful texture and shape, accompanied by the delicious crunch of their little black seeds, is delightful. Shungiku has a beautiful ferny leaf shape and a flavor reminiscent of carrots. Purple cabbage is stunningly beautiful. Xenia loves brassicas such as kale, broccoli, arugula, purple cabbage, and mizuna.
Microgreens are best eaten raw, as their diminutive size does not stand up well in cooking - and you don't want to cook out all those nutrients! Most people use them in (or as) salads, in smoothies, and on burgers and sandwiches. Micro-radishes are great on brats! They are also great just for grazing whenever you need a snack and a mental pick-me-up. Sunflower shoots are delicious sprinkled on a pizza just before serving.
How do you enjoy your microgreens? Let us know!
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Milk Braised Pork Loin
With the ice and snow mess that rang in the new year, we found ourselves without power. Time to make a meal in the wood stove oven!
Sandy, from Amor Gardens and Pork, set us up with a nice boneless pork loin, but I didn't really have a specific plan for it. I knew I wanted some comfort food, and was feeling a bit of a need to get away from soups and tomatoes. I ended up with something inspired by Arista Toscana: usually a pork rib roast braised in milk with caramelized onions and fennel. I didn't have fennel, and used pork loin, but this turned out really delicious!
Note, this is not a tested recipe, and we used the wood stove oven, which does not have exact temperature control. I'm just recording an ad lib here, so pay attention to your oven when you try to replicate it. Also, the photo is an afterthought cell phone snapshot: it really looks yummier in person - I promise.
12 cloves garlic (about 1 1/4 bunches of HITWF Music garlic)
3 onions (tallon)
1 Pork Loin Roast (Amor Gardens and Pork), ~ 3 lbs
Kosher Salt
Pepper
3/4 C mushrooms (I used some fall oyster mushrooms we foraged and dehydrated. If you use fresh, you might want more like 1 C)
3 C whole milk.
Preheat oven to something around 425 F.
Mince 4 cloves of garlic, and spread in the bottom of a lidded dutch oven or roasting pan. Slice the onions into 3/8" thick rounds, and spread in a layer in the pan.
Make 8 slits in the pork roast just large enough, and insert a whole clove of garlic in each. Season all sides of the roast with kosher salt and pepper, and set it on top of the onions and garlic. arrange the mushrooms around the pork.
Pour about 2 cups of milk around the roast. Cover, and roast for about an hour and a half. Add another cup of milk about half way through. Keep roasting until the thickest part reaches 160 degrees (a probe thermometer with an alarm really helps).
Remove the pork, and let rest for 10 minutes before carving. Meanwhile, use an immersion blender to blend about half of the onions and mushrooms into the sauce (or, transfer about half the onions and mushrooms, along with the liquid, to a blender and blend until smooth before returning to the pan). If the sauce is a bit too thin, reduce it a bit on the stove top.
Carve the pork into thin slices, and top with sauce. Serve with crispy roast potatoes and a kale microgreens salad. Yum!
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Living Capital
We continue our annual review this week by examining where we stand in living Capital. If you are a little lost, please check the December 28 Weeklyish for a description of our annual review process, and the eight forms of capital.
Living capital is made up of the animals and plants, as well as the healthy soils and waters of our planet. Our farm's living capital is defined by our stewardship of these resources. As with all eight forms of capital, it has its own medium of exchange: carbon, nitrogen, and water. If you remember your Earth Science or Ecology courses in school, you will recognize these as some of the most important cycles in the natural world.
Understandably, living capital is a primary driving force in many of our management decisions. We take a little different approach than many food producers, using a systems design model in which a diversity of different farm enterprises all interact, both to support each other and to support the living capital of our world. For example, while a "typical" produce farm would be interested in soil nutrient levels and microbial life, we concern ourselves more with how our livestock can improve the soil for our vegetables, which can, in turn, create a better climate for our tree crops, that create a better environment for our livestock.
As with any managed natural system, this is an area in which we will never reach perfection. But we have made significant gains recently:
The addition of our Katahdin x St. Croix sheep to our alpaca and geese mob, combined with intensively managed rotational grazing, has been a major driver in recent progress. In 2019 (soil test results to measure last year's impact will arrive in spring 2021, but we expect results to be even better), our livestock operations actually sequestered more carbon than they produced, advancing us significantly towards our goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2025.
Welcoming Josh, our new ram, to our farm means we will now be able to increase our flock size, eventually generating income (financial capital) that will allow further investment into our carbon reduction process, as well as increasing the positive impact livestock has on our farm.
The addition of our first high tunnel in 2020 helps us produce more vegetables on less land, and over a longer portion of the year, and with less energy input. This small area also has increased soil biological activity, due to the warmer soil that is active during a larger portion of the year.
We have improved our soil's micro-nutrient profile over the past several years, which makes all of our crops more resistant to disease and weather pressures, more drought tolerant, and more nutritious for the people and animals that eat them. We still struggle with some nutrients, in particular boron, but we are always progressing.
We believe we are improving our watershed's groundwater quality. The water upstream of our farm appears to have greater turbidity and more excess nutrient, shown by the frequency and severity of algal blooms above and below our farm. The water is also closer to a neutral pH exiting our farm than entering it. However, beyond informal observations and an occasional pH test, we don't currently have the means to measure our results with water. We would love to partner with an area soil and water conservation agency, undergraduate or graduate research project, or a school class or home school group with the means to monitor our water quality, and for whom the data would be helpful. If that describes you, please let us know!
So, on our Tragic to Great scale, we rate our living capital as "Great." This does not mean we can rest on our laurels (it's a little too cold here to grow laurels...), nor that we won't be less than great in the future. But, for this stage of our farm's development, we are quite pleased with our progress. The next stages for growth will be increasing the size and improving the management of our livestock operation, and developing our long-term perennial production systems for fruits, nuts, and perennial herbs.
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Order Deadlines
| Delivery Option |
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Deadline |
| Home delivery | Thursday |
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Tuesday, 10pm* |
| Pickup @ Culver Farmers' Market | Saturday |
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Thursday, 10pm |
| *Sourdough orders for delivery require an additional 24 hours |
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