Linguine with artichokes and pancetta

First things first, farm update. Team Pure Land have been busy li'l bees, we tackled all kinds of projects this winter. We trenched, laid, and buried a few thousand feet of irrigation pipe to make watering infinitely easier. We planted 38 peach trees and started 119 varieties of baby veggie plants, now ready to go in the ground. We've about finished our greenhouse, and it hasn't flown away yet! The design is almost complete for our barn / shop / walk-in cooler / apartment (with TWO bathrooms!!!) and soon we'll start swingin' hammers. We have spreadsheets and fun new equipment and terrace layouts and pest control strategery and new friends up the yin-yang. In short, there's a lot going on, and with Spring springing all around... things are about to get nuts. Wouldn't have it any other way!

My intention with this blog is to give you ideas of what to do with our produce as it comes into season and off the fields, into your homes. Unfortunately there's nothing ready to eat yet, so let's just pretend I grew these little artichokes. Aren't they cute? Thank you.

When your mother texts that she randomly bought a whole bunch of baby artichokes and asks if you want some, you say yes, then figure out what to do with them. I turned to this recipe from my fantasy BFF, Mario Batali. Pork + pasta + wine + artichokes + cheese? That doesn't suck! I modified the proportions a bit; Mario called for just 8 baby artichokes and 2 ounces of pork for a pound of spaghetti... I prefer more stuff than that. It turned out perfectly, a gloriously springy dish. The only thing I would change is a handful of parsley at the end. Get some baby artichokes from your mother or farmer's market and partake.

~1/4 lb pancetta, diced
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1 shallot, minced
~ 8 wee baby artichokes, trimmed up like so, sliced 1/4" thick and dunked into a bowl of water with a lemon squeezed into it (to prevent browning they say, but mine browned a bit anyway)
1/4 cup dry white wine
4-6 oz strand pasta (I had linguine)
freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Put a pot of water on to boil for your pasta. Cook it for one minute shy of the package directions, retain 1/4 cup of the cooking water, drain and set aside.

While that's happening, get your pancetta rendering in a little olive oil in a pan (that has a lid) over low heat. I like to let that go 5-10 minutes, then turn the heat up to start crisping the pancetta. Chop your garlic and shallot and add them to the pan, allowing to sweat another couple minutes. Now add the sliced artichokes, cover, and let cook for about 10 minutes, stirring once or twice. Add the wine, cover, and let cook another 5 minutes. When the artichokes are cooked through, add your drained pasta with the 1/4 cup of cooking water, toss toss toss, and taste a strand for doneness. Add a good shredding of Parmigiano-Reggiano, then taste again and adjust seasoning with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Top with more cheese. Sprinkle with parsley if you are smarter than me. YAY SPRING!

Serves 2, takes half an hour.

Tomato-braised lamb steaks, kale, and garlic bread

What month is it?... September, seriously?

The summer was an absolute blast. An absolute blur, to be sure, but man did we have some fun. Met scores of cool people, made great connections, and started allowing ourselves to dream a little bigger. Like a good li'l group of STEM professionals, we had designed the summer as a feasibility experiment: can we grow food, and will people want to buy it? After a long, hot summer of backbreaking research, the data have been interpreted thusly: Hell. Yeah. I'll cop to minor cherry-picking, but you know you can take the girl outta the lab, can't take the lab outta the girl. Overwhelmingly, our successes outweighed our failures, Farmer Pop's cholesterol went down 30 points, and I never want to see another zucchini again.

We established a Saturday morning home base at Saint Michael's Farmers Market, where they really treated us wonderfully and we got to know the names of our "regulars" pretty quickly. Our produce could have been on your place at Nonna, Restaurant AVA, or Bolsa, not to mention amazing Patina Green Home and Market, our neighbors in McKinney (who recently won Food Network's best sandwich in Texas). You may have had our veggies delivered to you by Greenling, too. And I've already got a couple new places already lined up for fall, like the Green House food truck and a very cool new all-organic shop opening up in Lower Greenville, Green Grocer. [This paragraph has been brought to you by the word Green.] 

Make a friend. Share your kale.

Ratatouille

Summer bounty... my fave.

I haven't been around much, so first of all, I must apologize. But I promise it has been for good cause; the farm is absolutely kicking ass. We've got more zucchini than you can shake a stick at (and I've shaken a lot of sticks at them let me tell you), basil bushes the size of pre-teens, pole beans just begging for another foot of trellis so they can plow further skyward. It is an absolutely wondrous thing of beauty, and we spend an embarrassing amount of time just strolling through the rows, winding vines on stakes and peeking under leaves, giggling while shouting what we've found to each other across the fields. I love how the cars on the road slow as they pass, how the passengers faces break into smiles as they point at all our hard work.

This is not to say everything has gone perfectly. Apparently the entire Collin County blister beetle population had never experienced the culinary foodgasm that is our potato plant foliage, so they dropped in and called aaaaaall their friends. Farmer Dad and I bravely fought the bastards for weeks before conceding yesterday... about four weeks shy of full growth. There ought to be some new potatoes under there, so all is not lost, but you won't be seeing Pure Land Organic potatoes next year, that's fo sho. Win some, lose some.

Yellow tomato gazpacho

This time of year, one of my favorite things to do is count the tomatoes on my countertop. 

From the garden this morning I collected six Husky Red Cherries, two nice Celebrities, and two orangey Old Germans. Living with them on the counter is also one big red guy from the "Texas Tomatoes" bin at Central Market (I suspect it's a Celebrity or Carnival). Even though I know I have a virtually limitless supply of tomatoes this year, I can't walk past the bin without buying a couple. Because, what if the five plants in my garden and the thousand plants at the farm die?? I should secure alternative tomatoes, just in case. And from the farm, five beautiful Yellow Perfections and fourteen little Golden Nuggets. I stow them in an assortment of cute bowls on the counter and visit multiple times a day to smile down at them and count again. I don't know why... it just makes me happy.

Farmer Pop and I have been busting our sweaty humps out at the farm (exactly one year old today - happy birthday, little farm) and yes, we really do have about a thousand beautiful tomato plants. Eight varieties in all, from little bitty red Sweeties to gnarly giant Beefsteaks. I spent the better part of yesterday morning scooting along the tomato rows in the sunshine, gently encouraging the plants up into the twine support lines, basking in the perfume of their leaves and grinning like a filthy, sweaty idiot. Every once in a while I'd stumble upon a ripe one and snag it for Quality Control. Yes... sweet, delicious Quality Control.

Paccheri and cheese with peas and mint

After many weeks of threatening without delivering, it is actually raining in the Metroplex. This is farmerspeak for "Yay, day off!!"

I made this so long ago, I had wanted to recommend it to you guys for Easter. Obviously, I'm still trying to work out my farm/blog/life balance... bear with me. Anyway, this is a great little pasta, perfect for a gathering as part of a buffet since it's not the kind of thing you want to make an entire meal of; it's yet another glorified mac and cheese, really. Fresh in-shell peas are still in big glorious piles at Central Market, and they just scream "eeeee spring!" to me. (And as of this morning, they finally have ramps too! Eeeeeee SUPER SPRING!) Peas and mint are a classic combination, of course, made all the more interesting with a few Italian cheeses: Parmesan, Fontina, and ricotta (although ricotta is not technically a cheese).