New Morning Farm - Blog

Recipe

10/18/2018

Apple Strudel Muffins

Recipe By:NMARIEA
"Fabulous apple muffins with a delicious cinnamon crumb topping! Give them a try -- you won't be sorry!"

Prep – 20 mins           Cook – 20 mins            Ready In – 1 hour
Ingredients
·         2 cups all-purpose flour
·         1 teaspoon baking powder
·         1/2 teaspoon baking soda
·         1/2 teaspoon salt
·         1/2 cup butter
·         1 cup white sugar
·         2 eggs

·         1 1/4 teaspoons vanilla
·         1 1/2 cups chopped apples
·         1/3 cup packed brown sugar
·         1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
·         1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
·         1 tablespoon butter
Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease a 12 cup muffin pan.
In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
In a large bowl, beat together butter, sugar and eggs until smooth. Mix in vanilla. Stir in apples, and gradually blend in the flour mixture. Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin pan.
In a small bowl, mix brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. Cut in butter until mixture is like coarse crumbs. Sprinkle over tops of mixture in muffin pan.
Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Allow to sit 5 minutes before removing muffins from pan. Cool on a wire rack.

Jim's Notes

10/15/2018

September 27, 2018
Hello friends,

Big news. Our first day of the new market last week in Chevy Chase was excellent! The Village Manager and neighbors have been extremely welcoming and helpful. And we had a great turnout of curious and excited residents. We’re hoping and expecting that soon that neighborhood will be as enthusiastic about us as you folks are at Sheridan.

Why does this matter to you? We need more sales to keep going! Between the horrible weather and the excess competition, we are struggling. But now that the new market is in the picture we should be ok for another year.

Worried that we’re going to send all the good stuff to the new market and short you at Sheridan? NO WAY! Nevah happen! We are carefully dividing everything up so everyone gets all the good stuff. Now it’s true that we do have some shortages of some things because of weather, but in most cases we have plenty and that will stay true for the fall and winter. Shortages will only show up in our wholesale marketing, and that doesn’t affect you.

As for me, in case you’re wondering, I know you didn’t see me last week at Sheridan because I was at Chevy Chase, and this week you won’t see me either, but that’s because I have a wedding to go to in New York. But I’ll be back regularly by next week, October 6th. I'll visit the new market occasionally, but I plan to be at Sheridan most of the time. The new market is being managed every week by Jen Roberts, the very nice and efficient young person who managed our Tuesday market this past summer (which is, by the way, done for the season). So, I hope you miss me, but I will be back!

One small news item: we told you last week that the peach season was over. But, amazingly, Chad Andrews, our nearby peach grower, just called to say he still has a few. We checked them and they are juicy and sweet, so we are going to bring some one last time. It's been an incredible peach season!

See you NEXT Saturday. I'll miss you!

Jim

Jim's Notes

10/11/2018

October 11, 2018
Hello patient readers and customers,

Well, we are dragging ourselves to the final stages of the worst season we’ve seen in our 46 years of farming. Ever since early May we’ve seen unprecedented rain, which really hasn’t let up over all those five months! For instance, in September we got 9 inches, and now we’re expecting rain through tomorrow.

What that’s meant to you, the customer, may not be obvious. We still have what seem to be normal markets every week, with lots of good produce for sale. But with such a variety as we typically have, some of you don’t notice the absence of some of our normal items. And we do try to make up for shortages by sourcing from our coop members or other local growers.

But the big problem is the financial impact of very reduced quantities of our mainstream, bread-and-butter items, like corn, tomatoes, beans, etc., and never enough quantities for our wholesale market. We invested lots of money to establish and cultivate those crops, then saw very inadequate sales numbers— no ability to repay spring loans. At the bottom line are the biggest losses we’ve ever seen.

So what next? We’ve been worrying and wondering. But a couple of weeks ago we did come up with a last-ditch plan that gives us some hope that we can keep going into another season.

The plan is two-pronged: first, cropping (what we plant and how much). We must control the risks of our extremely diversified cropping (over 50 different crops!) and acreage (if 20 acres is risky, then 30 is a lot riskier).

So we will stop planting many of our riskier crops next spring, and instead source them from other local growers, or just not have them for sale. (Would you really miss bokchoy, or fennel?). And by thus reducing total acreage, we can reduce spring payroll (biggest risk) and stop using some of our riskier, flood-prone locations.

The other prong is marketing. Our new market in Chevy Chase should give us significantly more retail sales, and if those sales are of items like our neighbors’ apples, that we don’t grow (risk), then that should help.

The big conclusion we hope everyone reaches is that if consumers want to have the real pleasures and benefits of fresher, locally and organically-grown food, then they can’t expect it to be cheap. The risks of growing produce in the climate of the northeastern U.S. are just too great. (Remember a couple of weeks ago I talked about our competitors in California who go for months with not a drop of rain?)

Thanks for reading. Your reward for tolerating this gloomy tale is a SECRET WORD! It is: “risk”. (5% discount!).

See you Saturday.

Jim

Jim's Notes

10/11/2018

October 11, 2018
Hello patient readers and customers,

Well, we are dragging ourselves to the final stages of the worst season we’ve seen in our 46 years of farming. Ever since early May we’ve seen unprecedented rain, which really hasn’t let up over all those five months! For instance, in September we got 9 inches, and now we’re expecting rain through tomorrow.

What that’s meant to you, the customer, may not be obvious. We still have what seem to be normal markets every week, with lots of good produce for sale. But with such a variety as we typically have, some of you don’t notice the absence of some of our normal items. And we do try to make up for shortages by sourcing from our coop members or other local growers.

But the big problem is the financial impact of very reduced quantities of our mainstream, bread-and-butter items, like corn, tomatoes, beans, etc., and never enough quantities for our wholesale market. We invested lots of money to establish and cultivate those crops, then saw very inadequate sales numbers— no ability to repay spring loans. At the bottom line are the biggest losses we’ve ever seen.

So what next? We’ve been worrying and wondering. But a couple of weeks ago we did come up with a last-ditch plan that gives us some hope that we can keep going into another season.

The plan is two-pronged: first, cropping (what we plant and how much). We must control the risks of our extremely diversified cropping (over 50 different crops!) and acreage (if 20 acres is risky, then 30 is a lot riskier).

So we will stop planting many of our riskier crops next spring, and instead source them from other local growers, or just not have them for sale. (Would you really miss bokchoy, or fennel?). And by thus reducing total acreage, we can reduce spring payroll (biggest risk) and stop using some of our riskier, flood-prone locations.

The other prong is marketing. Our new market in Chevy Chase should give us significantly more retail sales, and if those sales are of items like our neighbors’ apples, that we don’t grow (risk), then that should help.

The big conclusion we hope everyone reaches is that if consumers want to have the real pleasures and benefits of fresher, locally and organically-grown food, then they can’t expect it to be cheap. The risks of growing produce in the climate of the northeastern U.S. are just too great. (Remember a couple of weeks ago I talked about our competitors in California who go for months with not a drop of rain?)

Thanks for reading. Your reward for tolerating this gloomy tale is a SECRET WORD! It is: “risk”. (5% discount!).

See you Saturday.

Jim

Recipes

10/11/2018

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Honey & Cinnamon

Ingredients

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling potatoes after cooked
1/4 cup honey
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

4 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Lay the sweet potatoes out in a single layer on a roasting tray. Drizzle the oil, honey, cinnamon, salt and pepper over the potatoes. Roast for 25 to 30 minutes in oven or until tender.
Take sweet potatoes out of the oven and transfer them to a serving platter. Drizzle with more extra-virgin olive oil.

Jim's Notes

10/4/2018

Dear loyal customers,

For this week’s notes I thought I would reprint some comments I wrote recently in response to a complaint from a customer. Our pricing is a complicated story, and deserves some explanation. So here it is:

Sorry that we've disappointed this customer! We would gladly have responded to him in person if he had come to see us, or me, Jim, the owner. (I'm almost always right there at the market on Saturdays, and always happy to discuss any aspect of what we sell, including price.) We value our customers and always respond to (rare) complaints by offering money back or replacement of any disappointing produce. In fact, for all of our 46 years of marketing in Washington we have maintained a 100% money-back guarantee on every item we grow or sell.

All the produce we sell is grown in soil at our farm or a farm near us, and with every crop there's always a possibility that over-ripeness or some other grading (human) error can result in disappointment of the customer.

This season has been a good one for "donut" peaches, grown for many years by our neighbors and friends, the Andrews family, and we've sold literally thousands of boxes of them to our loyal, repeat customers, who have universally (until now) raved about their sweetness and quality. But of course it's always possible that out of these many boxes, some (or one) will be disappointing, and that's why we offer the above guarantee.

As for price, that is of course a long story, but let me offer a few thoughts. In many years of doing this we have struggled with the economics of growing produce in this climate of the eastern USA, where it's constantly frosting late, or raining at the wrong time, or very humid on summer days. These very problematic climate features (now being made worse by climate change) are not a problem in the parts of Mexico or the US southwest, where large-scale produce farms (our competitors) are located. But these places are 3000 or so miles away from Washington, and quality of produce is directly connected to freshness, as our customers know.

So long experience has taught us that we cannot make a living if we price our stuff at or lower than our competitors in California. For our first, naive few years we often went into Safeway to see prices, and considered that our prices had to be the same or lower than produce in Safeway.

But pretty soon we learned that we were absolutely not making a profit that way. Lots of risk and work, with no money in our pockets to show for it!

Then Whole Foods came along, and we started using their (higher) prices as a standard, which was appropriate because there were more certified-organic items to compare to. (Organic is another serious risk factor in production, that we have always had to deal with. Organic crops cost more to produce, for sure, and we have always been organic). So for many years we have purposely priced our things a bit lower, or the same, as organic at Whole
Foods, and we still do, for the most part. We often go in to WF to check prices, and we are often a bit lower than WF.

And now we have found that in some cases even those higher prices are below our break-even point. After all, the organic stuff in WF is usually grown in California or Mexico, with economies of scale and cheap migrant labor.

But here's the crucial pricing factor that took us a long time to realize: our own experience and that of our customers, in almost every case, is that the flavor, shelf life, and over-all quality of our organic produce is noticeably better than what's in Whole Foods. How could it not be, when we bring our produce directly from our farm to the market, often within hours of harvest? Vegetables are not commodities! One ear of corn is not the same as every other ear. One tree-ripe peach, hours from the orchard, is perceptibly not the same as any peach that WF will ever have in the store!

So the old cliche applies: compare apples to apples, not to oranges. Compare our organic produce to other organic produce of the same quality! If you do, I think you will see that our prices are fair, and worth the difference, if there is a difference.

Recipes

9/27/2018

Roasted Lima Beans

Ingredients
1 cup giant lima beans
4 cups water
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse salt
Juice of 1 lime
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Directions

Place the beans and water in a large saucepan over high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the beans are just soft, about 1 hour. Remove from the heat. Drain the beans and cool under running water. Drain thoroughly and spread on paper towels to dry.

Preheat an oven to 425 degrees F. Toss beans with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt, lime juice and cayenne. Spread beans out on a baking sheet and place in oven. Roast until beans begin to brown slightly. Serve warm or room temperature. Great as a snack!

Recipe

9/27/2018

Roasted Lima Beans

Ingredients
1 cup giant lima beans
4 cups water
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse salt
Juice of 1 lime
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Directions

Place the beans and water in a large saucepan over high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the beans are just soft, about 1 hour. Remove from the heat. Drain the beans and cool under running water. Drain thoroughly and spread on paper towels to dry.

Preheat an oven to 425 degrees F. Toss beans with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt, lime juice and cayenne. Spread beans out on a baking sheet and place in oven. Roast until beans begin to brown slightly. Serve warm or room temperature. Great as a snack!

recipe

9/20/2018

Stuffed Mini Snack Peppers

8-12 Mini snack peppers
1/2 Cup goat cheese, softened at room temperature, unflavored chevre is best
Herbs & spices of your choice
Black pepper
Salt
Olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 F. Cut peppers in half & pull of the membranes and seeds. They won't add any spice - they will just taste bitter
Pop them on a baking sheet & drizzle over a little olive oil and sprinkle with salt & pepper. Mix them so every single pepper is well coated.

I used several pinches of dried parsley & a couple pinches each of oregano & red pepper flakes. Also added a few grinds of black pepper. Mix until well combined.

Add a small amount of cheese to each pepper - press it down with your fingers as you fill them so it gets in all the nooks & crannies. It's best to use one hand to fill them & one hand to hold them.

Bake in oven for 15-20 minutes, or until the peppers start to soften & wrinkle. The cheese should be beginning to brown as well as the bottom of the peppers.

Eat them while hot! They're the best then.

Jim's Notes

9/20/2018

Hi folks,

So last week I described some frustrating marketing situations, but I did mention a plan that gives us some hope. And here’s the plan: we are happy to say that we’ve been invited to Chevy Chase, Maryland to open a brand new market!

Several of the neighbors there around Brookville Road have been looking for a farm or farmers to do a market, and they approached us just last month.

After some initial skepticism we realized that it’s just what we need to get back some market share. It’s far enough away from us at Sheridan, and far enough away from other farmers, that we think we will not be taking business from others.

It seems to be a neighborhood of many community-minded people who will value the kinds of foods that we specialize in.

So after lots of strenuous preparations (trying to duplicate all the equipment we use at Sheridan!) we think we’re ready for opening this weekend.

It’s a great location just off Brookville Rd, on Taylor Street, across from the Brookville Market (who’s owners like the idea).

So wish us luck. But if you’re a regular at Sheridan please stay with us there. We’re not sure we can handle the demand in the new spot!

Thanks for your support and helpful suggestions.

Jim.