red onion

Three ways we Cantaloupe

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Play outside the melon with these three recipes for salsa, sorbet, and salad that expands the can-do in cantaloupe:

 

Melon Salsa

Ingredients for Melon Salsa:

  • 2 cups diced Cantaloupe (1/4- to 1/2-in. cubes)
  • 1 cup diced cucumber (1/4- to 1/2-in. cubes)
  • 1/2 cup very finely chopped red onion. To take the sting out, after dicing up, sit in a bowl of cold water for 10 minutes, then take out, pat dry with a paper towel, and continue)
  • 1 serrano chile, stemmed, halved, and sliced
  • 1/2 cup roughly chopped cilantro
  • 3 tablespoons lime juice
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions (that’s it!)

  1. Mix all ingredients together in a medium bowl.
  2. Make ahead: Up to 1 day, covered and chilled.

 

Shaved Cantaloupe and Prosciutto Salad

Ingredients for the Cantaloupe Salad

  • 4 slices (1 oz.) thinly sliced prosciutto
  • 1 recently ripened cantaloupe, halved, seeded, and rind cut off (the less ripe, the easier and cleaner the shave for the salad, but the riper, the sweeter.  Find your sweet spot 😉
  • 8 to 10 large mint leaves, sliced thinly
  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 

Instructions:

  1. Heat oven to 350°. Set a rack over a rimmed baking sheet. Lay prosciutto on rack and bake until crisp, 8 to 10 minutes. Watch carefully. Let cool, then break into shards and chips.
  2. Shave off ribbons of cantaloupe onto a large serving platter, using a vegetable peeler, mandoline, or very sharp knife (really! Sharpen your knives folks!). Sprinkle prosciutto and mint over melon shavings. Drizzle oil very lightly over salad.
  3. Note: Nutritional analysis is per 3/4-cup serving.

 

Cantaloupe Sorbet

Ingredients for Cantaloupe Sorbet:

  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 3 cups 1-inch pieces peeled seeded cantaloupe (about 1/2 cantaloupe)

Instructions:

  1. Combine sugar and water in medium saucepan. Stir over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Bring to boil. Transfer to 11x7x2-inch glass dish and chill until cold, about 2 hours.

  2. Puree cantaloupe in blender until smooth. Add to sugar syrup in dish and stir until well blended. Freeze until almost firm, stirring occasionally, at least 3 hours or overnight.

  3. Transfer cantaloupe mixture to large bowl. Using electric mixer, beat until fluffy. Return to freezer and freeze until firm (do not stir), at least 3 hours or overnight. (Sorbet can be prepared 3 days ahead.) Cover and keep frozen.

 

Recipes are from Sunset (my favorite west coast magazine) and Epicurious.

 

 

Armenian cucumber & tomato salad

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This recipe features our armenian cucumbers.  These jewels are more closely related to melons. Their flesh is super crispy and the seed cavity is almost non existent. A great find from Noshtopia.

  • 1 cup peeled and sliced armenian cucumber
  • 1 cup cut heirloom tomatoes
  • 2 chopped green onions
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped red onion
  • Fresh dill to taste
  • 1/2 cup of your favorite vinaigrette
  • A sprinkle of hemp seeds for topping (optional)

Put all ingredients in a large bowl. Pour in the vinaigrette and toss the dressing into the vegetables with your hands until all is covered with dressing.

Summer Green Bean Salad

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This is a great meal to prepare ahead of time and just have waiting for you on a hot day in the fridge. Martha Stewart has actually got a pretty cool selection of recipes, which is where I found the base for what I’m sharing with you below.  I’m finding the best as they come into season and will post them here, of course.

My goal is that we can use the tags that I put on each recipe for you to find something to do with each bit of produce that you pick up.  Does that sound like a good plan? To see the categories and tags that we have so far, click the three horizontal lines on the top left corner there.

This recipe is catered towards the heirlooms that we’ve got coming into the store lately. I love the light crunch from the beans, which are only partially cooked and cooled, the juicy salty and sweet tomato, and the sweetness of the corn.  I’d like to experiment with not cooking the corn on this one.  Comment below on your thoughts!

Remember the neat trick we showed a couple of weeks ago on trimming your green beans in seconds?  Check it out here beneath our last green bean recipe.

  • Coarse salt
  • 3 ears corn, husks and silk removed
  • 1 1/2 pounds green beans, stem ends snapped off
  • 3 cloves garlic, peeled and gently smashed
  • 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 3 tablespoons red-wine vinegar
  • 1/2 small red onion, peeled and thinly sliced
  • 1 medium Heirloom tomato, sliced 1/2-inch thick
  • 2 cups of small, mixed red heirloom tomatoes, halved

 

  1. They say to cook the corn until tender in a large pot of salted water (5 to 7 minutes). Remove corn with tongs and set aside on a cutting board to cool. Using a strainer, remove any corn silk remaining in the pot. I like the taste of raw corn though, and I’d recommend trying it with raw kernels or if you’re near a grill, grilled corn. Yum!

  2. Add the trimmed green beans and return to a boil, and cook until very tender, about 8 minutes (timing may vary depending on the size of the beans). Meanwhile, cut the corn kernels off the cobs and put kernels in a large bowl. Drain the beans in a colander, shake to remove excess water, and put in bowl with corn. Add garlic and 3 tablespoons of oil. Toss well and let stand at least 30 minutes for flavors to blend; refrigerate if longer than 30 minutes. I think that this is a great recipe to try making ahead and storing in the fridge for the following day. It holds up well and lets the flavors marinate just a little bit more.

  3. If necessary, bring beans and corn to room temperature by removing them from refrigerator 30 minutes before serving. Just before serving, remove the garlic and add the remaining tablespoon of oil along with vinegar, onion, and sliced tomatoes. Add salt to taste and serve at room temperature.

 

If you’re trying the recipe, make sure to leave us a comment below! We’d love to know how it went!

The Story of the Murphys’ Onion

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We recently harvested our onion crop – a bumper crop this year and surprisingly so because we planted them in January. This incredible specimen is a true Murphys’ heirloom from the Vogliotti family. They were Italian market gardeners and also our neighbors for a good many years. It was one warm summer day, twenty year’s ago or so, that we went to visit Josephine Vogliotti. She was the last living member of her family at age 96 – her brother Ernie was 102 when he died

. The family was famous for their “vege-tables”, as she liked to say, selling them to the miners by horsecart in the day and later to folks that would come out to the ranch. For several years we’d been growing “their” tomato, the Camalay, and we would often bring her down a couple to enjoy and as always she would hold one in her hands and smell deeply, exclaiming “this is one of ours, isn’t it?” Those were precious moments and still today, after 22 years of growing and saving seed from that tomato, her words spring a tear. It was on one of these visits that Josephine directed us down to the cellar (where she hadn’t been for many years) to a jar on the shelf filled with onion seeds. We took those seeds home and germinated them just as she instructed (the first week after the full moon in August!). Luckily a few sprouted and that year we grew our first Vogliotti onion. After many trials and near losses, we were able to successfully bring this onion from near extinction to plenty. We have subsequently grown, harvested and shared many of the seeds with gardening friends to help preserve this now unique variety. The story goes that the onion was bought from Burpee seeds as a Red Weathersfield in the late 1890’s and continually grown at the ranch until the early 1990’s. They grew it for 100 years because of it’s flavor! We consider it be the best tasting summer onions ever. Eaten raw it is sweet and mild flavored, wonderfully so that it is perfect in a Greek salad or in a sandwich (with no oniony aftertaste!). Equally delicious sauteed or caramelized.
We posted a recipe to try it out on here

Pickled Red Onions

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This recipe comes from one of my favorite books, Chez Panisse Vegetables.  Pickled onions and carrots are great on a hot day, on the side of a dish as something to renew your palate between bites of your main meal, but mostly- I just want to pile these over some black bean filled tacos.

  • 2 large red onions
  • 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 1/2 cup water

Even more so than usual, you should definitely start this one with a super sharp knife! Did you know that dull knives are far more dangerous than sharp? To get this one perfectly, give your knife it’s due care. Peel the onions and cut them in half lengthwise.  Slice them very thin– as close to paper thin as possible.  Put them in a heat-proof container. Put the vinegar, sugar, and water in a small saucepan and bring to boil.  Add the boiling hot brine to the onions and leave to cool at rom temperature.  Drain just before serving or pack them into a jar and can-preserve them for later.