Hound, farm

This is "R Mutt," drawn for me by M.A.
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This is the time of year the CSA starts to pile on. Our farm, protecting the good earth of the South Fork from the scum of aristocratic development, has been doing well: all the rain has been welcome and it’s fallen at the appropriate time. I hadn’t realized this, but with two hundred members, Cobble Hill is the largest of the fifty CSAs in the city. A weekend ago, when I was visiting Added Value Farm in Red Hook, the CSA folks there said they had a better location. They were gloating shamelessly, but they’re right (unless it rains). Our distribution location is a church that’s so moldy you can smell it from the corner. But never mind: this week we got: an enormous eggplant, purple basil, leeks, tomatoes (I took a variety I didn’t know, a black cherry spin on the awesome Black Russians), green and purple peppers, swiss chard, and a pound of a sturdy variety of flattish green beans. I made pesto with the basil, with walnuts instead of the traditional pine nuts. The eggplant I reduced to a thick sauce with onions and crushed tomato, sautéing the onions in Irish bacon fat. (You can see where this is going: a pasta with eggplant sauce, pesto, and a bit of ricotta fresca.) The chard went to a deserving friend. Lately, I do the Greco-Turkish thing with the beans: cook them down, down, down with lots of garlic and tomatoes until they are as soft as a Republican’s brain.