Here’s where all the action is:
www.kawarthaCSA.com.
Check it out!!
How to poach an egg, perfectly.
Because why would you do it any other way?
1. fill a small pot with water.
2. boil said water.
3. get a bowl.
4. crack desired number of eggs to be poached into said bowl.
5. using a wooden spoon, create a swirling whirlpool vortex in the boiling water. can b clockwise or counter, your choice.
6. gently pour cracked eggs into the whirling vortex.
7. turn off the burner, but leave your pot on it.
8. hang out a bit. toast toast, saute greens, cut cheese, whatever you feel like.
9. peek at the eggs. take them out of the water getly with a slotty spoon or big fork when they look like poachy orbs. Longer = less yolky, shorter = more.
10. eat them however you want. (Like with greens, steamed or raw, St. John’s English muffins and Monforte Paradiso cheese, with some delicious sun-dried tomato pesto from the Fish Shak boys. Just saying.)
This will work for chicken, duck, goose, quail or ostrich eggs. Emu is questionable.
So we’ve gone and joined the circus.
It’s true – our newest pickup location on the east end is at Centre of Gravity - home of Zero Gravity Circus and the Canadian National Youth Circus! This place is amazing – it hosts birthday parties, community art classes, yoga, dance, martial arts, AND it’s a bone fide circus school – so they hold real classes in circus conditioning, juggling, hula hoop, aerial arts, vaudevillian theatre, clowning and comedy – and circus training for all ages! The Sideshow Cafe is also a fantastic space for coffee and tea and snacks and hang outs, with a great music selection and outdoor patio space, and they’ve got fantastic space for workshops, dinners, dance parties, and special events…I know. Does it get much cooler than that??
We’re pumped about this new east end spot – it had to be close to the Ceili and at least as cool, and be big enough to accommodate our incredible Leslieville support team (Leslievillians love local, and know good food when they see it!) – a tough shoe to fill and we weren’t sure we could do it, but we did – and got it right on a TTC line! There’s plenty of nearby parking, beautiful tree-lined streets perfect for biking or walking, and a bus and streetcar stop right outside at Greenwood – plus there’s Indian food right down the street if you can’t quite make it home without a snack. (Yep, we can move mountains too, if you were wondering. Serious inquiries only.)
This pickup will run on Tuesdays from 4:30-7:30pm – so you can come by after work, drop off the kids to circus school, grab a hula hoop class or a cuppa and treat on the patio, get your groceries from your favourite farming sideshow and still be home in time for dinner. Because you’ll want to eat right away, obviously…it’s gonna be a good year.
So come see us at the circus – appearing weekly in 2012 from June til November!
Get more details here, email info@kawarthaCSA.com – or just
step right up!
beet greens.
We have some at market right now – itty bitty beets with beautiful greeny greens, perfect for raw eating, sauteing, or – my personal favourite – grilling whole with a bit of olive oil and some salt.
These are from the Fisher farm, thinnings from their early beet planting under mini hoops, and our friend Christopher used them to create a masterpiece:
“Tuna again w/ Montforte creme fraiche. Bit of grey rush cream cheese with chives and your beet greens barely and quickly sautéed with your garlic. It’s on the beet bun from the lady in the corner to your west and south….”
= beautiful, delicious, and all from Wychwood Market. See you Saturday?
remember when I said summer was coming?
Well, this is what’s happening in the Kawarthas today:
If you can’t tell, that’s my windowsill. With snow on it. And the white stuff in the field? Not telling. And if you could see what was falling from the sky right now…
Maybe now that it’s almost May we’ll finally get winter. Wouldn’t that be something…
Summer’s coming!
And here it is – the unveiling of our 2012 CSA season!
This season promises to be the best yet – we’ve been working hard getting everything in line and are really excited about what’s on for 2012 – including our new name, Kawartha Community Shared Agriculture – Kawartha CSA! We’re still your Kawartha ecological growers, but we think our new organizational name encompasses everything we’re about: building community, sharing food and knowledge and supporting small-scale agriculture – the foundation for all of it!
Keep watching the blog for more details on what’s happening – we’re committed to strengthening our community and making the blog our meeting place for all of it, with weekly posts and updates – keeping you up to date with news, recipes, events and info. You’ll see changes taking place on the website slowly, so please bear with us…and in meantime here are the nuts and bolts of summer 2012!
Shares
Will start June 5th, and go for 22 weeks- with a week off right in the middle! And if your vacation time doesn’t line up with ours, never fear – we’ll let you defer up to 2 weeks credit, or swap vacay weeks with a friend!
- mini – $20/week (core only, no choice) = $440*
- small – $30/week (core + $10 choice) = $660*
- large – $40/week (core + $20 choice) = $880*
* We’re adding a gas fee this year – just $1/week, $22 on top of listed prices. A little means a lot – it’ll help keep your food coming, affordably, all season long – no matter how high gas gets!
** new members also pay an additional $25 startup fee.
Pickup Locations
We’re really excited about our new consolidated locations this year – we’ve searched out community oriented hubs that will allow for all kinds of great this season… we think you’ll agree!
- East Side: Centre of Gravity (Gerrard & Greenwood), Tuesdays 4:30-7:30.*
- Central: St. Alban’s Boys and Girls Club (Palmerston & Dupont), Thursdays 4:30-7:30.*
- West Side: Parkdale/Roncey Area (TBA) – ($30 prepacked only) – pending on interest and signups….
*time/day subject to change…slightly.
Sign up!
Throw your name down HERE and get on the list for 2012 – guaranteed to be our best season yet!
THANK YOU ALL For all your support, encouragement, feedback and advice – it’s more appreciated than you know. 
Sincerely,
Emma and Shannon, on behalf of all the Kawartha ecological growers.
carrots: cool as cucumbers.
need I say more?
Milo Fisher and family grow the majority of the orange carrots you get throughout the season and all of the storage carrots we’ve had in the winter shares and at the market. A blind-ish vendor carrot tasting at Wychwood one Saturday had Milo’s carrots at number one – for sweetness, crunch, flavour and follow through! These guys harvested and stored a literal ton of carrots for winter this year – all of which were eaten through the CSA and market….nice work team!
The Fishers are also the producers of everyone’s favourite smokey maple, those amazing sweet potatoes, most of our beets, and a variety of other wonderful veg – always top notch. They have a great farm stand right on the Glenarm Road – worth a check if you’re in the ‘hood!
Some great carrot recipes here…please send us your faves!
what about quail??
So these are not from our immediate community – I got them at Wychwood Market last week from the Webers, a family with an incredible selection of egg varieties! They were fantastic – gorgeous, mini, and delicious – a triple threat, as they say in the biz. The quail egg biz, obviously. Great enough to share!
ok, so quail, chicken, quail, quail, quail. A new twist on an old game.
what’s that saying about eggs in the hand? or is it birds? no matter – I could fit 5.
quail-ish dinner: mini eggs on mini toasts with mini greens. a hit in mini town, I must say… note the return of the scale fork!
duck, duck, goose…. eggs that is.
Actually, goose, duck, duck, chicken.
and for scale:
John Ebersol’s birds produce most of our duck eggs; John’s 14 years old and has a flock of 20 laying ducks, made up of both Muscovies (white eggs) and Indian Runners (blue eggs). The ducks are free to do as they please – they’re outside all the time foraging and puddling and doing other ducky things, and eat Ontario grown GMO free grains to supplement their foraging – some of which is grown within the community, some in Waterloo Region (through Jones Feed in Heidelburg, for those of you in the know). The ducks are laying hard right now and will continue to do so until the heat of the summer, when they’ll slow down some, then on til winter when they take a couple months of vacay from the egg laying grind. Duck eggs make wonderful eating; richer and creamier than a chicken eggs with a slightly different texture, and big, beautiful orange yolks (which come from the exercise and natural diet!) – the best poached eggs you’ll ever eat, and brilliant for baking, custards and quiches due to that aforementioned rich-n-creamy-ness…once you go duck in the pie department, there’s no going back. For serious.
John’s also got a few geese who just lay for a few weeks in the spring – so if you’re lucky enough to grab one of these beauties at market then do it! They’re worth about 3 chicken eggs each (the yolk alone is the size of a chicken egg!). We’ve only eaten these fried so far but they were amazing – if you’re a yolk guy or gal, this is definitely the egg for you. And they’ve got great novelty value too!
Not sure if this pic does it justice, aesthetically or otherwise, but gives you an idea of how big they are – regular sized dinner plate and fork, if that helps for scale!
The interesting thing about duck and goose eggs is they don’t have to be graded like chicken eggs. For those who don’t know, chicken eggs have to go through a grading process in order to sell them off farm/at the market – they’re taken to a federally approved grading station where a third party sorts them according to size, washes and inspects for cracks and other signs or rot or inedibility, then gives them the thumbs up for eating. (and in the case of non-organic eggs dips them in a chemical preservative solution. NOTE: egg shells have a natural preservative that’s removed when washed with soap. They’re also porous like our skin – meaning they take in any chemicals applied to their shells…)
Graded eggs need to be put into brand new cartons (no recycling allowed!) and those cartons into a brand new box which is stamped with the date and facility they were graded in. The cost of this to the grower is approximately $1/dozen – including trucking, grading, cartons and boxes – a hefty price for the small scale grower. There are some contexts where this third party grading system makes sense (i.e. big business industrial egg producing factories – which actually don’t make a lot of sense to begin with…) and others where it might not. An interesting and polarizing topic, to say the least! Right in line with the raw milk debates…
Google around if you’re interested in learning more. In the meantime, enjoy your eggs – no matter what kind of bird they’re from!