Chicken & Veggies

3 chicken breasts
1 tbsp chili powder
2 tbsp paprika
2 tsp rosemary
6 small carrots, sliced
1 med-lg onion, halved and sliced
1/4-1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced or halved as appropriate
4 tbsp Oil
2 c cooked rice
Heat about 2 Tbsp of oil in a pan.  When the oil is hot, place chicken breasts in pan and sautee until outside is browned.  Place top on pot, lower temperature and allow to simmer for 15-20min.
While chicken is simmering, sautee onions, mushrooms and sliced carrots in a second pan with oil. stir and cover with a lid.
When all veggies are cooking, add spices to chicken, turn to coat, cover and continue to simmer.
When veggies are just getting soft, add more oil if necessary and then add the rice.  Heat through.
Cut chicken into pieces, mix chicken and juices, veggies and rice.  Serve hot.

An Intern's Introduction

Hello, everyone! My name is Austin and, as Jason and Margaret told you last week, I will be the intern at Omache Farm during the 2012 growing season. I'm excited to be a part of the Omache crew, and hope that my hard work will be noticeable in the CSA boxes and on the market table. I look forward to meeting you and your family at the market!

During this first week of being an intern, I have already learned a few very important lessons on running a farm. For example, duct tape is the most important tool on the farm, even if it has a leopard print pattern. Also, always make bunches of vegetables bigger than they need to be, because happy customers is the surest way to a stable revenue stream. In addition, the market itself is like a temporary town; if you treat your neighbors with respect, you'll have willing help when you need it. Finally, the most important lesson I have learned is that sweat and elbow grease are renewable resources; why burn gasoline when you can burn calories?

As I continue my practical education on the farm, I'll be sure to share the best tidbits here in the newsletter. I hope I can enlighten all of you as to how Omache farm is helping to make the foodshed of the Palouse more sustainable, equitable, and fun! Thank you for coming along for the ride.

Your friend in the field,

Austin

Welcome Austin!

We would like to take a moment to Welcome Austin to Omache Farm.  Austin is our Intern for the remainder of the farming season and will become a familiar face at the markets and other events we attend during the season.  Not only will Austin have the pleasure of learning about weeding, transplanting, harvesting, fencing, feeding and the other basic menial work of vegetable farming, but also, he will have the chance to learn about record-keeping and keeping books, going to market, and all the little whys and hows of our farm from dreaming up an enterprise to planning it to implementing it to taking it to market.

Austin is majoring in the Organic Agriculture degree at WSU.  He hails from the Seattle Area and currently, the plan is to go back and start a small urban farm.  Austin has started with us at a great time for him because our starting a CSA is very fresh in our mind and he is really getting to see a CSA from the very beginning.

We are very excited to have Austin joining us and look forward to giving him the experiences necessary to help him feel confident in starting out on his own in the future.

If you have a chance, please stop and say hello, chat, and get to know Austin at the Markets this season!  As much as he can learn from us, our customers have a lot to offer to the Internship experience.

We look forward to a great season Austin!

Radish Cakes

1 bunch radishes, washed and topped, shredded.
1 small onion, finely diced or shredded
1 egg
½ c. Garbanzo flour (Or wheat or other flour as suits
1 c. oil for frying

Pour oil in a wide, shallow pan and heat on med-high heat until shimmering.

Meanwhile:

Mix radishes and onion together in a bowl.
Add flour and mix until well coated.

Add egg and mix until you have a paste that when formed by hand into patties sticks together. (Some adjustment in flour or the addition of an egg may be necessary.)

Form about ¼ cup of batter into patties about ½ in. thick and place in fry oil. Fry for about 2 minutes, until brown, turn and fry a minute or two until the second side is brown. Drain cakes on a rack or paper towels, serve hot (if you can even get any to the table!).

Variations:

Diced celery, shredded cabbage, diced mushrooms, or other similar vegetables may be added as desired. You will need to adjust the amount of flour and egg to achieve the desired consistency of the batter.

If you would prefer to avoid frying, you might experiment with cooking these on a well-oiled griddle.

First week of the Market and CSA!

Believe it or not, Farmer’s Market and CSA season is upon us!

On the 15th, the Tuesday Grower’s Market will begin.  4:30-6:30pm in the Moscow Food Co-op’s Parking lot.

On the 16th, the Pullman Farmer’s Market will be from 3:30-6pm.  Hopefully the earlier time will catch some more visitors!  The market will be in the same location as last year: The Spot Shop parking lot on Kamiaken just up the hill from Swilly’s Restaurant.

We WILL be attending both markets and we WILL have CSA pickups for folks at each of those markets. 

The CSA share for the first week as well as the net couple will be fairly light and very green.  The first few crops coming ready for the first week include salad mix, radishes, baby kale and chard.  There will be a couple other crops as well but just about everything will fall under the category of “baby” for the first few weeks.  I have to say, we are rather impressed with ourselves between building two hoophouses and such a cold, wet spring along with moving house for ourselves, that we have managed to grow just enough crops to bring shares to market these first few weeks.  Don’t forget however that as we get further into nice weather and more veggies come ripe that the shares will be nearly bursting at the seams! In the meantime, my mouth still waters when I think about the first meals of fresh veggies from our gardens!

For those of you on our newsletter list, your newsletter should be arriving in your email inbox as a pdf attachment on Mondays.  Those folks in the CSA that provided their email address are on our list for those emails already.  If you do not receive a copy of our email and newsletter, please let us know!  for CSA folks, I may have incorrectly typed your email.  For anyone else interested in our weekly newsletter email, Please send us an email and ask to be added to our newsletter list.  We don’t sell any information ever and if you find that you no longer wish to be a part of our list, just let us know that too.

Our weekly newsletter is emailed in a pdf format, will usually be about two pages this year and will include a recipe along with farm news, stories and a couple photos.  If you have someone with which you’d like to share a copy of the newsletter, please feel free to pass it on!  Please share and encourage others to check us out!

Changing again!

Life is all about change.  This time we’ve got a huge change.  We are finally moving from Pullman out to live on our farm!  We’ve been talking about it for years and devising various plans to make it happen faster, none of which stuck, obviously.  But now, here we are, living on our farm!  What a dream come true!

We’ll be 100% out of our old house by the end of the month and living mostly in the basement of our new house until sometime in June or July when the estate sale will take place.  After that, we will be able to start moving into the rest of the house.  By Thanksgiving, we should be putting the final touches on our new HOME.

Already, in just one week of living here, we love it!  Our first morning was pretty warm and Jason merely stumbled out to the hoophouse to open it up and then came back in for breakfast.  No packing children up in a rush, no grabbing food on the run or missing it altogether, no missing necessities like diapers forgotten or running back into town and out again multiple times in one day.

We can come in for lunch and naps (for children, mostly!) and merely pause for making dinner rather than having to call it a night completely.  HannaMae and Alli can hang out inside and watch movies or play with toys if they don’t feel like playing outside.  They can come in when they get cold while we finish covering crops when frosts are imminent.

Such an amazing blessing we have been gifted!

Twitter & Facebook

 

We are now fully in the 21st century!  You can follow us on twitter now: @OmacheFarm

We’re still figuring out how twitter works and the best way to integrate twitter into our business so comments and feedback is always welcome.

Don’t forget that we also have a facebook page: OmacheFarm

While our Blog is the “Hub” if you will of our online presence, Facebook and Twitter provide us with places for more immediate updates and little snippets of our day-to-day life on the farm including photos of everything, links to recipes, news stories, other farms and things we are learning about.