The Fink Farm Dirt

Gardeners are always talking about heirloom plants: grown year after year by generation after generation from seeds taken from each year's harvest . I think heirloom recipes are just as important and just as much fun. The first bite of my mother's strawberry shortcake recipe, takes me back years to the lingering light of a summer day in northeastern Oklahoma with the family around the dining room table enjoying strawberries with whipped cream and flaky, barely sweet biscuits.  So, in that spirit, I'm offering some heirloom recipes. Some are made from plants we grow at Fink Farms, and some not.  Some are old recipes from friends and family. Some are simply good recipes enjoyed summer after summer.  Green Tomato Pie by Jo Ann (Floerke) Morrison (1931-1996) This recipe was contributed by my friend Cliff Morrison, whose mother made this pie. 1 cup brown sugar ¼ c white sugar 4 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons butter 6 to 8 small green tomatoes, thinly sliced 1 lemon, quartered...

We worried about when to harvest the butternut squash. There's no greening, yellowing, reddening, deepening or other particular sign of ripeness once it reaches a certain size.  Google Extension Service suggested harvesting before the first frost.  In California, that would be the day before Never. In Nature's wisdom, the plants told us. The huge green vines that had sprung up on their own, just turned brown and shrank back on their own, leaving six heavy butternut squashes dangling from their red and yellow net bags. (We'd strung them up to keep them away from the wetness of the earth and the mouths of the snails.) We cut them down and divided the harvest. My first butternut squash, I simply seeded, roasted and scraped the flesh from the shell. Butternut is bland, a lovely gold color, but -- yawn -- not much flavor.  But it was fresh and home grown. That imparts something wonderful to it, if you have the stillness and focus to be aware. I have a recipe for r...

This summer, the mottled umbrella-like leaves of an butternut squash plant have popped up on the west end of Fink Farms. It's interesting since we never planted butternut squash. In fact, we have never had butternut squash in the farm. But we have composted butternut squash remains, and we have had other volunteer plants from using compost. (The ever-helpful Google Extension Service offered up an anecdote about a man who scattered his rich homemade compost over his front yard -- and ended up with butternut squashes shading his St. Augustine grass. True? You tell me . . . ) It's hard to keep a compost pile running hot when you're feeding it out of one and a quarter kitchens. (Karen is the one because she just has to take a short walk from her kitchen to the compost pile; I'm the quarter, because composting for me requires collecting decaying veggies, putting it in my car and driving it over to Karen's. For awhile, it got to be such a problem that I was freez...