In our blog archive, July 2010, Tim & Sally Eller provided a recipe for Roasted Cod with Chanterelles and Seaberries.

Created by CSA member Tim Eller:

Seared Duck Breast with sea berry sauce

Sea berries are a chef’s challenge.  They are extremely astringent, but also very flavorful.  Also unusual enough that it is hard to find reasonable sounding recipes.  Here is my second attempt at a solution.  It is very loosely based on duck la orange.  It really works.  Serve on warm plates, with a spoon to scoop up the sauce.

4 duck breast fillets, skin on

½ pint of fresh Daring Drake sea berries

2 tbs maple syrup

2 tbs Daring Drake plum jam

Sprig of thyme (or ½ tsp dried)

1 cup of chicken stock (or veal, or duck, or Thai)

2 tsp soy sauce

2 tbs butter

Pinch of salt

1 tsp arrowroot starch

1. Zap the sea berries in a blender, briefly.  Run the result through a fine sieve, pressing the pulp to recover as much of the juice as possible.
2. Preheat oven to 175. 
3. Simmer the sea berry juice, maple syrup, plum jam, thyme, and stock for about 30 minutes, until starting to thicken.  Add salt and soy sauce.  Swirl in cold butter.  Set aside.
4. Sear duck breast in hot sauté pan (hopefully a non-stick pan).  Sear skin side first, for 5 to 7 minutes, without moving.  Flip and sear other side for 1 or 2 minutes.
5. Move duck beast to a warm plate, and put in 175 degree oven for about one hour.
6. The duck will exude a lot of juice.  When it’s nearly done (instant thermometer in thickest part reading 135), pour off the juice and add it to the sauce.  Bring to a slow simmer.  Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water, and rapidly stir it into the sauce. 
7. When duck is ready, slice on the diagonal, dress with lots of sauce, and serve.

From a CSA member….

We just had some of this ketchup on veggie burgers and both agreed that it was great.

Here’s the recipe, from the Joy of Picking :

2 pounds currants or gooseberries
3 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups cider vinegar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground mace (we used a little under 1 teaspoon nutmeg instead)
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground ginger

1. In a nonreactive pot, bring the fruit, sugar, and vinegar to a boil. Reduce the heat, and simmer the mixture until the fruit is soft.
2. Puree the mixture in a food mill., or press it through a sieve.  Return the mixture to the pan, add the spices, and cook the ketchup until it is think. (about as thick as tomato ketchup).
3. Ladle the ketchup into pint or half-pint mason jars, leaving 1/4 inch head-space  Close the jars with hot two-piece lids.  To ensure a good seal, process the jars for 20 minutes in a boiling-water bath.
4. Store the cool jars in a cool, dry, dark place.

Makes 2 pints.

-Yum!

Michele, at Hayward House B&B in Interlaken, is serving up delicious gooseberry and currant treats for her guests this weekend.    Our nearly complete recipe book is full of Michele’s berry baked goodies.  This season the challenge is to come up with berry cocktail recipes.  Send us your best cocktail recipe, we have a CSA volunteer who will taste test each recipe and we’ll post all of them here as well.  At the rate I’m going, we can put them into the recipe book as well.

We will be at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market on both Saturday and Sundays through berry season and into melon season.  We have been picking like mad and this weekend we will hit the market with:  black raspberries; gooseberries (Invicta, Hinnomaki Red, Hinnomaki Yellow, Tixia, Black Velvet); red currants, black currants, white currants, and those most delicious Pink Champagne currants.   CSA folks, bring a box to carry all your goodies this week!

Gooseberries and currants (Ribes) are now ripening.  For the past week we had Jonkherr van Tets & Red Lake red currants and now the berry fun will really begin.  Look for Ribes at the Tuesday & Saturday IFM.  We are negotiating with Green Star to sell gooseberries and currants but so far we are unsatisfied with their mark-up on the fruit price.

The Daring Drake Farm Produce Stand on County Road 138 is now open for business.  All fruit and vegetables sold at the stand are grown by us unless otherwise noted.  We have asked other local, organic growers whose agricultural practices we respect to help stock the stand.  All produce will be noted as to farm origin.  We will not sell produce that we picked up at the docks – fruit and vegetables picked before being ripe and shipped a distance before reaching our area.  Support local farmers, buy local food!

Nothing is ever easy in the fruit world.  We thought the Hungarian cherries were well-netted, super secure and then the bountiful crop of Danube Cherries vanished, literally, overnight.  The Robins are master theives working hard to find any little gap in the netting.  Hope the birds enjoyed their feast – we are not amused and neither are our CSA members. 

To cheer ourselves up we took a tour and ate the first ripe berries on a number of the Ribes plants.  It is like sitting at the top of a roller coaster hill with only a few days before everything ripens at the same time! 

We’ll open our fruit stand on CR 138 July 2nd with red currants and the first of the gooseberries.  At the Ithaca Farmer’s Market we’ll have red currants and by Saturday, July 2nd MAYBE the first gooseberries and MAYBE black raspberries.  Hope for some sunny days ahead!

It has become apparent that farming takes precedent over blogging about farming. 

This wet spring is getting everyone antsy – when can we get into the field to work! ?  Friends came over Friday and we were able to plant 430 trees at the new land on CR 138.  This is the first planting for the Daring Drake u-pick orchard.  Hope for some sunny days ahead.

The girls have slowly started laying again.  We hope to keep Greenstar stocked for the rest of the 2011 season.  In March we will begin having Regional Access deliver our eggs to all the other great upstate Coops that carry our duck eggs.

I thought we should post a quick update.  The driveway and barn site have been cleared and stone laid by Ray DeLong.  We are waiting to mid February or early March to put up the new production barn for Blackduck Cidery.  Fourteen apple rows have been laid out to begin planting an organic u-pick orchard.  This first planting will be about an acre and include the varieties Shizuka, Honeycrisp, Crimson Crisp, Macoun, Melrose, Grimes Golden, Mutsu, Summer Rambo and Newtown Pippen.  Another two+ acres of u-pick will be planted in 2012 with another 10-12 varieties.  This does not  include the pears and cider varieties will be planting on the back of the new property (stop by we have an address 3046 CR 138  Ovid, NY 14521).

Work still moves on at the home orchard as I try to pound posts to trellis gooseberries, that are now bushes, into a multiple fan cordon system.  Lots of fun in frozen ground.  Tree fruit pruning begins this week. 

Idunn wants to leave a dirt pile forever.