Hartwood Farm Vegetable Guide
Are you new to using vegetables or being in the CSA? Or do you just want to make your veggie haul last the longest? Either way, this guide is for you!
Here’s all our favorite storage, handling, and preparation tips for all the great veggies you can find on the farm. Dig in and enjoy (and please, please feel free to share your favorite uses and recipes with us!).
Scroll on down and click on the veggies you want to learn more about, or you can check out some of our general vegetable prep information:
The Hartwood Farm Crops:
About this Guide:
We’ve been growing vegetables in one way or another since 1998 and providing for our CSA and markets here in upstate NY since 2012. These past twenty years have been quite a journey for us as our farm evolves and grows, but also been a bit of a culinary adventure. While we both feel pretty comfortable in the kitchen, we’ve realized over time how overwhelming veggies can feel to prepare, especially when you get busy.
Just like we sometimes feel overwhelmed by the complexities to grow and harvest each of the fifty plus crops and three hundred varieties we raise, we realize that you, our awesome CSA members and market customers, may also feel a bit overwhelmed by all the different methods of handling, preparing, and enjoying this myriad supply of delicious veggies.
The sad (well, sad to us as vegetable farmers) thing is that it’s SO much easier to cook starches and meat and dairy—we totally understand this because we find ourselves at crunch time doing the same thing, and we are even vegetable farmers surrounded by veggie goodness!
Over the years, we’ve really worked on sharing how to use and prepare all the awesome flavors of vegetables we grow. This year we’re taking all those hints and tips of using the veggies and consolidate them into one resource in one place to help you use your share of veggies—this veggie guide!
This guide takes a couple page to cover almost every veggie we grow on the farm (we are always adding new ones, so there might be a few that aren’t in here yet).
It shares how to identify each (we are adding pictures this winter), when it’s in season, how to handle and prepare it for cooking, and what are some ways to use it, including our favorite preparations. It also includes a cheat sheet of times of how long each preparation method takes, and a sense of how long you can store each crop.
Number One: Don’t Worry!
One thing we hear from a lot of customers is that folks are worried about spending a lot of money on vegetables and then not using them up or else cooking with them, but then not really enjoying the preparation you went with. Our philosophy for cooking vegetables (coming from two busy people that are okay, but not great cooks) is that less is more. We figure that since we are starting with super fresh, local, and (hopefully!) naturally delicious crops, that we can focus on simple preparations that really let the veggies share their flavor. We focus on cooking methods that are hard to get wrong—basics like sauteing, roasting, or making quick salads.
But honestly, sometimes things don’t go great together, at which point we make notes and try again with something else the next time that vegetable is back in season. You also don’t have to like every vegetable, so don’t feel guilty if you realize that you just don’t like something! Personally, I’m not a fan of lettuce, but I’ll fight you for that last rutabaga.
What we mostly want to share is that doing a CSA or eating locally from markets can be fun. Yes, it will take a little more time in the kitchen (but not too much more), but hopefully will pay off in terms of great flavor, interesting new dishes to add to your repertoire, the fun of trying new things, and all those health benefits of eating veggies!
General Produce Storage and Handling Guidelines:
Each veggie in this guide will store best under certain conditions, but in general (and when in doubt), 95% of vegetables store best at low temperatures in high humidity. You can create this type of environment by using loosely sealed plastic bags (or some of those reusable fancy vegetable storage bags) combined with the crisper drawer in your fridge. The only catch is that many veggies react poorly to ethylene, which apples release, so don't put apples in the same crisper as your veggies!
While we wash many of the vegetables at the farm to “hydro-cool” them (a fancy way of saying we use super cold water to cool them off super-fast so they last longer), we recommend that you wash everything before you eat it, because veggies are grown out in the ground and can get dirty! In an ideal world where we all had infinite time, you would wash out the vegetables right when you get them home, spin them partially dry in a veggie spinner, before storing them in a loosely closed plastic bag in an apple free crisper drawer.
In the real world, this might not always happen. You will want to get the veggies into the fridge right away, and make sure that they are in a plastic or storage bag so they don’t desiccate in the fridge. When you are ready to use them, it’s actually often best to wash them in mildly cool or lukewarm water as that can help refresh them more than cold water.
(We also are fans of “cooler cleaner” recipes—simple meals that can help us easily use up all of the veggies that are reaching the end of their life before the next round shows up! These go-to meals for us include vegetable soup, crock pot dishes and soups, casseroles, quiche and frittatas, and mega-salads!)
An Overview of Cooking Methods for Veggies
One last thing we wanted to cover are the methods of cooking that we find easiest for vegetables. This isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather the preparation methods we turn to most often. It’s also not a veggie specific list—you can mix in meats and grains and all sorts of other stuff with all these preparations!
Raw—chances are, when you think of eating vegetables, a bit salad comes to mind first. And yes, tons of vegetables are best raw. One thing we’ve really liked with the whole “bowl” concept that is popular now is that so many different veggies are not being eaten raw, not just the same old salad crops (lettuce, spinach, or radishes) you might initially think of.
Stir-Frying or Sautéing—this is our go-to method of preparing vegetables in a hurry. It’s essentially putting oil in a pan on the stove-top and then adding vegetables in the order of what takes longest to cook down to the fastest cooking items.
Baking (or Roasting or Grilling)—while there’s a bit of nuance between these cooking preparations, we find that tossing lightly oiled veggies in the oven (or on the grill) is a simple way of enjoying the sweet flavor of each crop. One word of warning, while these are some of the easiest ways to prepare vegetables and take no time during the hour of cooking, there can be a bit of labor in all the cleaning and peeling and preparing of the ingredients.
Steaming—this might be the easiest way to prepare vegetables and is arguably the healthiest as it uses a lot less oil than sauteing or baking. Steaming is also one of the quickest ways to cook vegetables! Our only warning is to watch how quickly they cook! Our crops are super fresh and often much more tender than grocery store vegetables so they cook A LOT faster in a steamer, like sometimes in only a minute or two!
Boiling—we rarely boil vegetables aside from potatoes or things we plan on mashing, though we know it’s a favorite cooking method for many others. We feel that our veggies might be too tender to boil, so if you use this method, check them often to not overcook!
Microwaving—I know, this might sound like sacrilege to some of you, and I didn’t have a lot of microwave experience in the past, but we are starting to realize that we might be under-utilizing this preparation method, based on member feedback. We are hearing of more and more folks using the microwave to partially cook veggies that take ages, and then finish off cooking them with more traditional methods (so far we’ve heard of this with winter squash, potatoes, rutabaga, and beets). I’ve also started making my summer lunch of fresh greens and beans by nuking it, and it’s so fast and easy! Let us know if you have any experience on this front that we can share!