Season's End

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.

Simple Summer Supper

On these sticky summer days I like to make a salad for supper.  And with our garden and local farmers market in full swing it's easy and healthy.  Last night I improvised on a recipe I'd seen on line and this is what I came up with:

Mediterranean Salad
serves two

several handfuls of mixed greens

one hard boiled egg

cucumber slices

avocado slices

red bell pepper
kalamata olives

one can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained

Arrange the above ingredients as you like (you can see my composed version above), drizzle with homemade balsamic vinaigrette and enjoy. Serve with a glass of dry red wine. Cantaloupe makes the perfect dessert.

Any salad ideas from you readers?

Early Summer

White peonies blooming along the porch

send out light

while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human

heads! They're staggered

by their own luxuriance: I had

 to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,

and the moon moves around the barn

to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening

I draw a blossom near, and bending close

search it as a woman searches

a loved one's face.

Peonies at Dusk, Jane Kenyon