Garlic Scape Pesto

 If you walk into the farmers market right now, you will see garlic scapes at almost every booth! They are the shoots that shoot up from hardneck garlic. It takes nine months for garlic to mature in the garden, and the scapes are a flavorful bonus as you are waiting for your garlic head to finally be ready.

The first time I heard of garlic scape pesto was when my friend, Aubrey, from Heart and Soul Farm brought me a jar and told me that I needed to find a way to grow garlic scapes. We tried it and were hooked on it's punchy garlic flavor, and immediately ordered a package of three organic hardneck garlic heads to be planted in the fall.

Nine months later, we had a few plants with scapes. We shared some with the Dietrichs, saved the garlic heads, and replanted everything again in the fall. Now we are harvesting that patch this summer and we are so excited to be able to bring garlic scapes to market and provide them for our CSA members!

                                                   

Ingredients-

3 garlic scapes, roughly chopped

1/4 c walnuts (you can also use pine nuts if you are feeling fancy)

1/4 c parmesan cheese (we always add "a little" extra)

1/2 lemon zested and juiced

1 t salt

1/2 t pepper

3/4 c olive oil (we like to be able to drizzle ours, if you want a thicker pesto, you can reduce the oil to 1/2 c or even 1/4 c)

Put the scapes in a food processor and pulse 10-12 times. Add the walnuts and pulse 10-12 times. Add the parmesan, lemon zest, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Pulse 10-12 times. Turn the food processor on low and slowly drizzle in the olive oil until everything is fully combined.

The final product!

Store in a jar with a lid for up to 1 month in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer (don't forget to use a freezer safe jar!) We love to eat this with any kind of bread or with pasta. Below you can see that we made breakfast sandwiches with homemade biscuits, scrambled eggs, arugula, and garlic scape pesto. Hope you enjoy!

Napa Cabbage Salad

 We've officially hit the season on the acre where our spring vegetables are growing in abundance, giving one last push before the summer vegetables come into full swing.

This is a salad that we love and that we've adapted over the years from Trisha Yearwood's Thai Cabbage Salad that you can find on Food Network. It's a great way to use up your spring vegetables and it's cool and crisp to eat on a hot day.

Salad Ingredients:

1 head Napa cabbage, roughly chopped

2 green onions, diced

10-15 sugar snap peas, roughly chopped

3 Hakurei salad turnips, diced

3 radishes, diced

2 carrots, diced

1 small cucumber, diced

Dressing Ingredients:

1/2 c oil

1/8 c sugar

juice of one lime

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

optional- pinch of red pepper flakes or dash of hot sauce to add heat

Some spring favorites include sugar snap peas and spring onions. Napa cabbage isn't as popular, but we hope you learn to love it too after tryng this salad!

Roughly chop your Napa cabbage. We always tell customers to wash their head lettuce because dirt gets stuck in the layers as you can see in this photo.

We use both the bottoms and tops of our spring onions in this recipe. The blushing onions add a fun pop!

The nice thing about this salad is that you can change up the vegetables! The original recipe called for carrots and cucumber, and we started adding in any extra vegetables we had left over from market. Some of our favorites to add in are salad turnips and radishes for their great texture!

We also started adding in sugar snap peas for their sweetness and crunch.

Throw all of the vegetables into a bowl. They look pretty layered (our daughters joke that it's like eating a vegetable trifle) or toss it to mix everything up.

Pour the oil, sugar, lime juice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper into a canning jar. Put a lid on and shake vigorously. Pour over your vegetables. You can eat it right away, but we like to cover it and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of hours to let the flavors come together.

Enjoy!