Recipe For The Best Meal Ever

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Hello dear email subscribers!

Thank you for being wonderful customers, friends, family, email pen-pals, and enjoyers of fresh food. Here's what we've got for you this week.

What we've got:	Carrots, beets, hakurei turnips, radishes, salad mix, arugula, tat soi, kale, collards, rainbow chard, head lettuce, hon tsai tai, cherry tomatoes, and big, red, juicy slicing tomatoes.
Where you can find us:	The Port Angeles Farmers Market, Downtown Transit Center, Saturday 10-2

I threw a small tantrum on Tuesday. I was so hungry, and despite our entire backyard literally full of fresh food I grew from seeds, I was convinced that we had absolutely nothing to eat. You all get hangry too, right? I satiated my hunger with some tortilla chips dipped in carrot top pesto from the night before. You all eat strange things when you're desperate and hangry too, right?

Once I had a small snack to tide me over I was ready to reopen the fridge and take another look. Turns out we had tons of food in there. And so, I am going to share with you the meal I cooked that night, a recipe for The Best Meal Ever.

First you need to make a dressing. It is comprised of fish sauce, chili paste, water, and sugar. You are going to want to fry up a nice big cauliflower from Wild Edge Farm. But you don't have oil to fry it in! So you roast it instead. And that spicy fish sauce dressing will remind you of the roast turnip dish from a few months ago. You remember that an entire drawer in your fridge is dedicated to the storage of turnips. Okay! Veggies are tossed with the dressing and in the oven roasting.

You need a grain and you only have rice. 2 cups in a pot, cover with 4 cups of water. Shoot! You know what would make this so much yummier? The leftover chicken soup from last week. You strain out the water and replace it with chicken soup. Put that on the stove.

Toss veggies. Do not take out turnips until they are browned and crispy looking.

You may need to take a temporary break to go and make sure the chickens are staying out of your garden. Maybe you have someone like Andy who will reinforce your fence for you and come back with his pockets full of sugar snap peas. You'll remember there are some ripe tomatoes on your counter. Chop those up with the peas.

Have your helper (Andy) go out and get one mint leaf and a couple sprigs of parsley. You've got your "flavor vision" on and you're concocting a fabulous flavor creation in your mind. Mix some of that spicy dressing, yogurt, and herbs. Nope...that was weird. You scratch it.

Try something else. This time mix mayo and sriracha. Thin with water until it's the consistency you think will pour nicely over your veggies and rice.

Put your bowls together. Rice, cauliflower, turnips, chopped tomatoes and peas, herbs, drizzle that sriracha over the top.

Enjoy!

As your eating you are just over the moon about how delicious it all tastes. You get to thinking about the turnips, how you have an entire drawer-full because you just harvested the row that got forgotten beneath the squash.

Then you think about the rice and how delicious it tastes when cooked in soup. The soup was leftover from last week when you needed comfort food. You were having a bad day and had homemade soup on the couch while watching WALL-E.

Then you start thinking about the tomatoes...when did you last feed them? and should you feed them again tomorrow?

You think about the cauliflower from your new farmer friends and the things you've been dreaming up together...

and the peas...eating the last few handfuls of the very first seeds you sowed. Back then you didn't think anything would ever grow, and would it ever stop raining?

and here you are. Eating a bowl full of stories, a bowl full of memories. You're not a particularly mindful eater (most days you're so hungry you scarf down your dinner), but this food demands your attention because you are so deeply connected to it.

So, that's the recipe for the best meal ever. Grow food and eat it, eat more food that you are connected to, make meals full of memories.

All the best from our tiny farm,

Melissa, Andy, and the animals