Perhaps the most adventurous way to drink your veg this summer is this tomato soda. Recipe and photo by Makenzie Smith. Linked below!

Happy Friday! Three quick reminders before we dive into this week’s main post.

1. CSA Members: Did you know that we have a CSA Referral Program? Our CSA Program no longer has a waitlist (wahoo!), and so all of your friends are cordially invited to join in on the veggie-fun! If you a refer a friend to our CSA Program, you get $20 and they get a free box. To refer a friend, simply tell them your referral code. You can find your referral code in the upper right corner of your “My Deliveries” page. When your friend joins the CSA and enters your unique referral code at checkout, you’ll get a $20 credit and they’ll get a free box. Shoot us an email if you have any questions! 
2. We have three new CSA Pickup Locations that we want you to know about: Texas Blooms and Gifts (in Austin near the Triangle), North Lamar (off of Cannoneer Lane), as well as a new site serving the Hurst, Texas area. If you’re interested in switching your current pickup locations to one of these new sites, just shoot us a message. To see the sites on a map, click here.  
3. Just a friendly reminder that this veggie storage guide exists. Storing your vegetables properly is most important during these hot summer days. Speaking of…

Have you looked at the forecast for the next week? If not, we hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s going to be brutal. We’re talking multiple days mucking through triple-digit temperatures. Many pools are closed, but there are alternatives. Bring back the ice-bucket challenge or do like we do at the farm, and simply spray your friend off with a hose (most can reach 6-feet). You can curbside an inflatable pool, or for the committed among you, invest in a stock tank pool. They’re all the rage this quarantine. This week on the blog, we’re here to suggest 5 sippable recipes that will help get you through this upcoming heatwave. We’re usually in the business of suggesting how to eat our produce, but it just seems right to drink some veg during the hottest days. Staying hydrated will, in fact, help keep your body temperature down. 



Some of the recipes below are boozy, and technically, drinking alcohol won’t help to cool you down. If you’re aiming for pure hydration, the three recipes below that contain alcohol would be absolutely delicious without the booze. If your inflatable pool is waiting in the shade and you’re aiming to libate, the two recipes below that do not contain alcohol would be absolutely delicious with the addition of a jig or two. Booze or not, we hope you cheers your way through these hot, hot days. We certainly will! 

Tomato (or tomato and peach) shurb. You heard it here first, y'all. Tomato soda might just be the next big thing. Recipe and photo by Mackenzie Smith.

1. Mackenzie's Tomato Soda

When you grow thousands of pounds of tomatoes every year, you end up eating your fair share of the fruit. As farmers, we thought we had surely tried just about every way there is to enjoy fresh tomatoes, but boy were we wrong. When Mackenzie Smith suggested we make a shrub with tomatoes, our minds were blown. This recipe is such a simple and delicious way to preserve the taste of summer. If you're new to shrubs, this vineargy concoction is often made with fruit and berries, and the resulting sweet and syrupy concoction makes a wonderful addition to a glass of sparkling water.

Megan keeps these mason jars in her freezer, margarita ready at all times. Photo courtesy of Meg.

2. Megan's Spicy Watermelon Margarita

At the core of this recipe is the simple technique for making watermelon juice at home. Add tequila (and some spice) and you've got Megan's margarita, but you could also adapt this recipe and simply add mint and cucumber to the watermelon juice for instant hydration. We hope you're not thirsty when you look at this picture because there is something about these giant mason jars full of iced down watermelon juice that really has us hankering for a sip.

3. Anne's Cool as a Cucumber Juice

Last summer we sat down with local acupuncturist, Anne Woods Miller, to talk about how to beat the heat. In addition to eating more raw foods, Anne also suggested to "add more foods with blue, green, and purple colors to your diet. It's simple, cooling colors cool the body."  Scroll to the very end of this blog post for Anne's green summer juice recipe which makes use of cucumbers, mint, and swiss chard... all contents in this week's CSA shares.

We promise this drink will taste incredible with our without the fire-red nails. Photo by Rick Cortez.

4. Nadia's Honeydew and Green Tomato Gimlet

Wikipedia tells us that a gimlet is "a cocktail typically made of 2 parts gin and 1 part lime juice. A 1928 description of the drink was: gin, and a spot of lime." Nadia's gimlet? She manages to sneak the summer into this classic cocktail, using not one, not two, but three summer classics: honeydew melon, green tomatoes, and basil. Though we're not moving as many green tomatoes at this point in the summer, something tells us Mackenzie's tomato shrub would make a suitable substitution for the green tomato water in this recipe.

5. Summer's Watermelon, Lime, and Basil Granita

Okay, technically this granita is more easily eaten with a spoon and isn't exactly sippable, but this sorbet-like dessert most certainly deserved a spot in this week's post. "Granita hails from Sicily and is essentially a fancier shaved ice typically made with fresh fruit. You can make granita with any fruit, but we got a perfect mini watermelon + a bunch of fresh basil in our CSA box  and this idea was born." Thank you, Summer for embodying your season so well.

Bonus Recipe: Krishna's Limeade.

If you're new to the JBG Community, you may not know that our operations manager, Krishna, is an incredible cook. On a very hot day this past October, we spent the day cooking with Krishna. We made huge platters of Indian delicacies for the barn staff to feast on. Many of the recipes featured summer veggies like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and potatoes - now is the time to cook this menu if you haven't already! On this day, Krishna introduced us to a simple 4-ingredient drink that is a fresher alternative to Gatorade, perfect for an energizing jolt after a day in the heat. Excerpt from Cooking with Krishna:

Lime-ade: The day Krishna and I cooked, it was warm, made warmer by the fact that there was no AC in the farm house we were cooking in. We were hot. After enjoying 1, 2, and then 3 servings of our feast with farm friends, I headed back to the hot kitchen to clean up. Except there was Krishna, drying off the last pot…. Krishna had already cleaned everything. He handed me one of his grandmother’s stainless steel nesting bowls filled with a liquid and said “drink this”. Lime juice, water, salt, and sugar, less diluted than your traditional limeade and leaning more towards “delicious nourishing tonic” than “derby cocktail with straw”. 

Checkout the original Cooking with Krishna post to learn about the sweet story behind this engraved bowl. Photo by Scott David Gordon.