Winter Week Six: Super Smoothie

Happy New Year everyone! We celebrated with family visits and a touch of stomach flu. Viruses seem to get passed around whenever Seda sees her cousins.

We're feeling better now, thankfully, and hoping that you all had lovely New Year's celebrations with no vomiting :)

And now I'll start talking about food.

For half share members this week's share will include: two pounds Carrots, Rutabaga, Delicata OR Sweet Dumpling Squash, Acorn Squash, Cabbage, Onions, Flax Seed, Dried Greens, and Fruit and Flax Leathers.

Full share members will receive all the half share items plus: 2 additional pounds Carrots, 2 choice squash, Kale Chips, and Kohlrabi.

I am especially excited to be distributing Fruit and Flax Leathers this week. Everyone will receive two different kinds, blueberry and butternut. Both kinds have only three ingredients, apples, blueberry or squash puree, and flax seeds. Everything is grown in the Upper Peninsula.

Blueberry Fruit and Flax Leathers

The Fruit and Flax Leathers are one of our Wintergreen Foods products. We made our first few batches of them in the fall of 2014 and introduced them to the Ontonagon School vending machine, with great success. This year we've made quite a few more of them, and have been selling them through the Northwind and Keweenaw Co-ops in addition to school vending machines. If you are interested in getting them into your child's school, please let us know.

In 2014, the flax seed we used in the Fruit and Flax Leathers was grown by another Ontonagon farmer, but this year we grew it ourselves.

A small slice of the field of flax we enjoyed this summer.

And we harvested enough to include some in the winter shares. 

I have sort of a love/hate relationship with mass media food marketing. I don't like websites that claim certain foods are magical cure-all "super foods" because I know that nothing in life is that simple, but at the same time I understand that our farm business has been successful in part due to the national trend towards local foods--a trend which is not always that far removed from the websites touting "super foods". I also grow and sell some of the items that get labeled as super, like kale and, now, flax seeds. So, maybe I should just go with it ;)

Pro-biotic Super Food Smoothie with Flax Kale and Blueberries

• 2 cups plain Yogurt
• 1 Banana
• 1 cup Blueberries (either frozen or fresh is fine) 
• 1 Tablespoon Flax Seed
• A handful of fresh or dried greens

Combine all of the ingredients in a blender, food processor, or large container if you are going to use an immersion blender. 

Blend them up!

This recipe makes enough for at least two people to share.