Winter Share 2012-13 – Week 9

Freedom Rangers, Peas, Dragon-tongue Beans, Carrots, Rhutabagas, Potatoes, and more
This week’s special ingredient is something that we are very excited to offer.  It is a heritage breed chicken called a Freedom Ranger.  Our usual chicken, the Cornish Cross, is the typical commercial meat bird.  It has more white meat and large breasts.  The genetics have been perfected over the years by breeders to make the Cornish cross more “efficient.”  From the consumer side of the equation, it is usually what they want too – more white meat, more breast meat.

The Freedom Ranger, in my opinion, is tastier.  It is smaller, has leaner breasts, and tends to have a darker, oilier texture to the meat – more like dark meat.  The birds convert food into weight gain at a slower rate, so they are more expensive to raise.  These birds were raised outside in chicken tractors (mobile pens that are moved around an organic grass field) at Wholesome Valley Farm in Wilmot, OH.

To compliment your chicken dinner, we have a great selection of winter vegetables this week – rutabagas, Yukon gold potatoes, carrots, beets, and frozen cauliflower and frozen peas.

Finally, there is one additional ingredient that gets me all fired up this week!  It is the dried, shelled dragon-tongue beans.  Do you remember these from the summer?  They were the large, flat green bean that were white with purple stripes.  At the end of the season, our farmer Harvey took the plants and harvested them, stalk and all.  He then arranged them in the field in what is called shocks.  A “cap” was then placed on the shock (a hat made of straw) and the shocks were allowed to dry.  Once the beans were dried, he separated them from the plants and ran them through a threshing machine, which removed the beans from the pods.  When it was too cold outside to work the last few weeks, Harvey and his helpers cleaned the beans by hand (sorted through them) and bagged them up for you to eat!

Also, we have upped our yogurt order this week.  Last delivery week we had our first shipment of Snowville yogurt.  Well, it sold out at our first stops on Thursday.  As a result, we have ordered A LOT more so that everyone can try it.  We will have yogurt for the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday groups this week for sure.

If you didn’t see the email about the yogurt last time, I pasted below this week’s contents what is so special about it.  It is $6 per container.  The creme fraiche is $5.

Don’t forget to signup for Summer 2013.  The summer season registration has begun.   All existing customers are guaranteed their spot when registering before March 1.  Please don’t hesitate – registration only takes seconds.

Winter Week 9:

1 whole freedom ranger chicken

3 lbs rutabagas

3 lbs Yukon gold potatoes

1 lb carrots

0.5 lb dried dragon-tongue beans

2 bulbs kohlrabi

1/2 lb honey puffed spelt and corn (cereal)

1 lb beets

1 quart frozen cauliflower

1 pint frozen peas

1 winter squash

About the new Snowville Yogurt and Creme Fraiche

We are proud to introduce Snowville Creamery’s new yogurt and creme fraiche products.    Both will be available at the back of the truck, in addition to our usual yogurt from Velvet View Farms.

The creme fraiche is a thicker sour cream containing 36% fat.  It is quite tasty and will go great on top of tacos, in dips, and whipped in with mashed potatoes.  It has half the fat of butter and can be used as a substitute for butter when frying eggs, potatoes, or even browning ground beef/chicken.

Snowville’s Yogurt is a “whole milk and then some” yogurt made from a concentrated milk.  What is that?  Well, essentially Snowville takes the whole milk, which is naturally around 4.25% butterfat, and pushes it through their “nano filtration” process. The nano filtration process separates out some of the water from the milk and increases the percentage of milk solids and fats in the milk. Why does Snowville do this?  Because they needed a heavier milk to make a thicker yogurt.  Is this “greek style?”  It might resemble it, but we say no. In fact, Warren Taylor at Snowville proclaims, it is “American” style.  Greek style yogurt, which is should be traditional “strained,” is often not strained but rather modified in modern dairy facility to be thickened with dried milk solids.  These dried milk solids have no nutritional value.  Warren opted to keep the nutritious whey in the yogurt and not add any dead milk solids.  To do this, he starts with a 6% butterfat milk, addes his cultures, warms it up to 183 degrees for 30 minutes for pasteurization, then slowly cools the milk to 100 degrees where it sits for approximately 8 hours until the yogurt is ready.