Heirloom Tomato and Garlic Scape Pesto Tart {Get to Know a Farmer}

Heirloom tomatoes and marinated mozzarella balls snuggled under a blanket of garlic scape pesto and more mozzarella make a rich savory tart--or delightful breakfast.

If you read one of those 13 Farmers Market Secrets Savvy Shoppers Share type articles, one of the tips is invariably "get to know a farmer".  Joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share is a terrific way to get to know a farmer.  For the duration of the growing season you'll have the opportunity to visit with the folks who grow your food.  This "get to know a farmer" stuff can pay off deliciously [and for me the payoff is usually locally grown tomatoes].

There is nothing better than a locally grown tomato.

Tomatoes have seasons.  Some get off to a quick start like cherry tomatoes and early varieties. Some take their sweet time growing and setting out fruit, to the point that you think they'll never amount to anything, but once they get going they're unstoppable 'til frost.* Some suffer setbacks early on--like nibbling from varmints--yet recover to become a big bushy productive plant.  They are a lot like kids, now that I think on it.

I'm talking about tomatoes, and getting to know your farmers, today for the simple reason that this recipe happened, last November, because I got to know our farmers. See, my spouse spent last tomato season in Afghanistan. He missed out on eating fresh tomatoes and our daily lives [not in that order]. Sure, they fed him from May to November. But he always returns from deployments super skinny so I'm always frantically cleaning planning menus with all his favorite foods when I know he's heading home.

It was with this mindset that I asked our farmers in early November if they had a spare tomato. I'd canned all the ones from my garden, and we'd had oh, easily 12+ weeks of various ripe tomato varieties in the farm share. I'm sure most folks were more enthused about the prospect of a sweet potato. But I wanted to make my spouse a tomato sandwich, so I emailed our farmers with the request.  You may, if you love local tomatoes, understand the sheer delight when my newly-returned spouse and I went to pick up our farm share and Farmer Josh disappeared for a moment then returned with not one but 4 gorgeous heirloom tomatoes.  Swoon! In addition to that sandwich I had enough for this tart--double points for a rich tart that's one of my spouse's favorite tomato dishes.

Get to know a farmer.  It's so worth it.

Red, White & Blue Muffins {Muffin Monday}

Roasted beets and strawberry jam provide the red, while white chocolate chips and blueberries round out the trio for a festively-colored and tasty snack

It always bugs me, as someone who thinks local produce tastes better than stuff trucked in from Off, to see Red, White and Blue recipes using fresh strawberries alongside fresh raspberries and fresh blueberries.  Why?  Wherever I've lived, those berries are not simultaneously in season.  Late spring is the time of the strawberry, and the raspberries and blueberries come along later in Summer.  If I'm going to combine berries, I'll need to use some that are put up (by freezing or by jammin') so that I can get the best flavor.

Beets are one of the vegetables that we don't devour within days of getting them in the farm share [beet greens, however, I adore and gobble up ASAP]. Beets are long-storing, though, and freeze beautifully after roasting, so in the winter I'll often grab a bag of roasted beets out to thaw and then decide what to do with them. 

Adding roasted beets to muffin batter makes a naturally vibrant result [even in savory form]. I wanted to make a colorful muffin so a beet base seemed like a good way to start. Strawberry jam for summer flavor, plus blueberries and white chocolate chips, make this muffin on the sweet side for my baking--but with only ¼ cup sugar it's still a snack I'm jiggy with feeding my kids.

For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipes Collection. For other recipes using blueberries, please see my Blueberry Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. After typing so much to give you A Peek into My Process I'm going to jump right to the recipe.

Strawberry Lemon Bisquick Snack Cake and A Peek Into My Process

A light strawberry lemon snack cake, fast and easy to make and delicious warm or chilled

Warning:  This is a long post.  But there's cake at the end, so I think it's worth it. 

"Cake makes everything worth it." (Meghan McCarthy)

Apparently I'm continuing last week's trend of writing lots and lots and then sticking a recipe at the end.  Instead of teaching you about nurturing your garden soil, this week I'm giving you A Peek Into My Process.  Blame Meghan for all this--she roped me into it by asking me to answer the following questions.  She wanted me to tag other bloggers to keep the chain going but I'm a chain letter breaker.  So--if you'd like to answer these 4 questions, please comment and I'd be delighted to link to your writing process post.  Let's get this over with.

• What am I working on/what am I writing?
• How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre?
• Why do I write what I do?
• How does my writing process work?

Old school--writing on paper, scheduling on paper, losing countless papers.

#1.  Well, I'm working on this, obviously. I'm also weeding, putting up strawberries, decluttering the house and clearing through nearly 500 emails that piled up over the past months (so many good blogs to visit) in between handing off my computer to the kids so they can work on summer online classes,  enjoying movies with popcorn (no kids with braces!) and 3 day weekends with my spouse. What am I writing?  See #4.

Blogging while on vacation--that's dedication, folks.

#2. This one is easy.  More cowbell Pizza! When I first found other CSA bloggers, the primary thing  I noticed was that they shared photos of their farm share boxes (which appeals to the voyeur in me) and talked about how they used the items that week.  That's inspirational, but I was looking to provide more practical support for local eating. Inspiration's great if you've got the skill set to run with it, but some practical support helps you to succeed.

I see this with my kids all the time.  Setting them up for success with appropriate supports results in far better outcomes than just telling them to wing it.  In the kitchen and in life. Once you have a foundation--then wing away, baby, wing away.

I feel what sets my blog ever-so-slightly apart is that while I'm showing you how to use the farm share produce via my recipes, I'm also showing you how I put up the produce we can't consume right away, how I use that in the off season, and I'm helping you find ideas for other produce via my recipe index.  Indexes.
And every once in a while I'll show you what's in my box, too.

Ah, one of my favorite meals--and one of my favorite posts.

 #3. I believe every dollar you spend is a vote for what matters to you.  I choose to spend money on local small businesses producing food in a way that nourishes the environment. Over the years I've learned that a lot of folks agree with me--but while it's a lovely idea to get a farm share, the reality of eating this way can be very hard to adapt in your kitchen.  This is why I write this blog.  I want to help everyone who desires to eat locally to succeed, so I provide recipes using seasonal ingredients, storage tips for off season eating, and a recipe index to help you figure out what to do with the contents of your crisper.

#4.  This is the long answer. Let's look at that cake to remind us why we're sticking with it.

Since we eat seasonally, even though I just grilled up the last of the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve [butternut squash are particularly long-storing] I won't post that recipe until Fall.  But the photos have been taken, uploaded, and indexed so I can find them when I need them.

In a perfect world the spouse would edit the photos to make them pretty, but apparently I'll "never learn to do this until [I] just do it" (the whole Worlds Collide thing) so I am painstakingly--with a blunt object instead of a surgical scalpel--doing this myself.  I know I want a horizontal/landscape photo at the top because I think most food looks best this way and for Food Frenzy Digest to pull, plus a square photo for the food porn websites when I remember to submit, plus a vertical/portrait shot that I can add a title to for Pinterest. When I photograph the food I take a variety of images to get all bases covered.  But this post is supposed to be all about writing. Ahem.

I also jot down the recipe notes, hopefully in a notebook but sometimes on a sticky note or on my FB page, so that when I go to write the post I've got the recipe info.  Otherwise it's back to the kitchen, and if it's a seasonal item I sometimes have to wait a year. Best just to jot down as I go.

Often, while I am cooking, I will think about what I want to say in the post.  When I've got ideas flowing it works best to sit down and write them out.  This post just poured out of me while the pizza was baking. If the words don't come, I move on to something else. With 50 posts in some form of the publishing process [they've got at least 1 of the 3: recipe, photos, or headnotes entered in the computer] as well as more in the notebooks, I don't need to force it, I just pick something else.

where I was writing this post--on the porch, with Vincent as a lap dog desk, Simon and Wee Oliver Picklepants on lookout

Thanks for taking a peek into my process--it was fun reflecting and ruminating on this post.
Let's have some cake, shall we?