Whoa! Farmer Luca looks on in amazement at the giant Russell avocados!
If you love giant avocados, you’ll enjoy today’s farmstand.
We also have baby spicy salad mix, microgreens, arugula, asian water spinach, garlic chives, basil, thai basil, lemongrass, and two out of season renegade cucumbers who just cropped up on their own this summer. In the fruit department we have for you today: local bananas, malay apple (aka wax jambu, Caribbean apple, pomerac), mesple (aka brown sugar fruit), mangoes and strawberry guava!
If you’ve been very very good, we have freshly made Sweetface chocolates, and Feel I’s icecreams in local fruit flavors.
And we have beautiful native trees for sale.
We love you. Come see us on this fine glittery Saturday morning, 10am to noon!
Our baby mix is made of tiny tender leaves of various greens including mustard, arugula, radish and lettuce greens, harvested just moments ago at the ARTfarm.
For our Saturday morning crowd today we have spicy baby mix, microgreens, arugula, and asian water spinach. In the fruit department there’r carambola (star) fruit, bananas, mangoes, soursop, jackfruit, eggfruit and breadfruit. For treats we have Feel I’s ice creams, Alisha’s Sweetface chocolates, and all the charms of Farmer Luca!
It's fruit salad time! Green and yellow Cavendish bananas rest atop a pile of Haitian kidney and Valencia Pride mangoes at ARTfarm.
You see them at the farmstand. They are what bananas might look like if they were genetically spliced with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe they frighten you. Maybe you simply don’t know how to eat them. Let us help you.
Plantains are a sweet vegetable in the banana family, delicious baked or fried, green or yellow. The yellower and riper they are, the sweeter they become. Like bananas, they come in many varieties, shapes and sizes.
Plantains are amazingly tasty cousins of bananas. They are starchier than bananas, so generally are much more palatable when cooked. Plantains can be eaten when the peel is green or yellow. The riper they become, the sweeter they are.
Sweeeeeet Yellow Fried Plantains
For sweet yellow plantains like the ones in this photo, we like them fried. Peel off their thick skin, slice them lengthwise into 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick pieces and fry them in a hot buttered pan, turning occasionally until they are nicely browned on both sides. These are insanely good as a snack or dessert. They hold together better than fried bananas. We challenge you not to eat them all at once.
Potatoey Green Plantains
For green plantains, you can bake, boil or roast them like potatoes. They are a very nutritious starch with plenty of fiber. They’ll be trickier to peel, so try cutting both ends off, making a slit lengthwise along the peel, and keep your hands wet as some kinds of green plantains can stain your fingers!
Tostones
You can also use plantains to make tostones, which are essentially plantain “chips.” To make tostones, you peel and slice the plantains into rounds, about 3/4″ thick, season them a bit, fry them in oil until just golden, drain and allow them to cool. Then smash them flat, and fry them again briefly to achieve crispiness.
Search the web for more detailed recipes on making plantains part of your healthy, local, Caribbean diet. Experiment, and tell us about the results on your next visit to the farmstand! Who needs potatoes?
ARTfarm on a cool and lovely Saturday morning features eight shades of green with a dash of orange: microgreens, teen arugula, asian water spinach, kale, basil, garlic chives, lemongrass, breadfruit, and the very last pumpkin of the season. We have fresh local eggs, too!
For sweet teeth today we’ve got lots of choices: pineapples, papaya, soursop, eggfruit, mangoes, Feel I’s ice cream in various flavors, local honey, and Sweetface chocolates.
We also have pineapple slips to grow-your-own pineapple, and a variety of species of native trees for sale!
Come out to the farmstand and lounge in the shade with us!
What a pineapple sees: view from the pineapple patch. Photo (c)2011 Ginger Lobb
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 