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!
See you this morning!!
Today’s ARTfarmstand features GREEN: microgreens, teen arugula, asian spinach, basil, lemongrass, garlic chives, breadfruit. GOLD: Valencia Pride and Haitian Kidney mangoes, carambola (star) fruit, pineapple, and eggfruit. Locally made honey vinegar, Feel I’s ice cream, and Sweetface chocolates. Alisha has a new flavor: ginger chili. Yummers!
We have pineapple slips for all you budding pineapple gardeners out there. Two bucks for the little ones, three bucks for the huge ones. It only takes 18 months to grow your own! Fun for the kids!! Teaches patience!!!
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 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.
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.
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!
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?
Today we have LOTS of yummy salad options: young arugula (teen, baby), spicy salad mix, and microgreens! For healthy veggies and herbs, we’ve got asian water spinach, breadfruit, chives, basil, and lemongrass. To round out your vitamin intake we have jackfruit, mangoes, crazy sweet and yummy plantains, and eggfruit. Also back in action: a full range of Sweetface chocolate flavors including new ginger chili flavor, Feel I’s ice cream, local honey, and fresh local eggs.
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 