After several weeks of an extraordinary display of fall colors, our trees are now shedding their leaves as winter approaches. The dark and the cold are just around the corner. Our garden produced admirably this year, except for the summer squash. Have you ever even heard of summer squash not producing? Well, ours were a wipe-out and I didn't once open my entirely squash cookbook.
Bill is the vegetable gardener and I am the cook and preserver. His specialty is garlic and about 60 heads of the Russian variety are stored for soups, stews, stir-fries, you name it. We even send some to appreciative friends in California. And then there are the tomatoes-cherries, slicing and Romas.
This batch is ready to be made into pasta sauce, which I freeze. It makes a wonderful meal on a cold winter's eve. Bill gets his yearly quota of bacon with day after day of BLT's and eats the cherries right from the bush. Me? Well, I only like my tomatoes cooked-that's too bad, but I've tried and it just doesn't work.
This is my first ever batch of ratatouille, made from our tomatoes and garlic, with squash, onions and eggplant from the farmers' market. Yum.
And then of course there is the basil. This year I made three recipes of pesto and socked it away in the freezer. It will last until the spring if I'm careful. My favorite way to use it is as a topping for salmon or white fish. You can even buy less expensive frozen fish if you prepare it this way and it tastes great.
We still have many carrots and beets in the garden and they only get sweeter as the fall progresses. And we have a bumper crop of arugula, which loves cool weather-twice I've taken it to choir rehearsal and given away bunches and bunches.
How lucky we are- a bounty from our garden to sustain us during the cold, frozen winter months.
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