Harvest. It's Pretty Damn Cool

10/11/2011 apples , bounty , fall , Harvest 0 Comments

I love fall. It’s my favorite time of year. I love how the leaves on the trees turn into beautiful, blazing colors. I love the crispness in the air to where it’s cool enough to wear a hoodie and the air smells like wood smoke. I love the gray days and that it gets darker early (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it staying light in the summertime until 10:30 at night. There’s something seriously wrong with that). I also love that my favorite shows starts their new season. And I love the bounty of fresh food from the garden and trees.

Speaking of fresh food, our tomato plants did wonderfully this year. A few weeks ago, Kevin had made a huge batch of fresh yummy salsa with them, and on Saturday he made a pot of stewed tomatoes, then poured it in four containers, and stuck them in the freezer. We used the rest of the tomatoes for sandwiches and salads.

We also have a rhubarb plant, so I made rhubarb crisp for Kevin’s work, then chopped a butt-load up and stuck it in the freezer. And then my neighbor brought us three autumn cup squashes.

I love, love, love squash all mashed up with butter and brown sugar over it.

Yummy.

Then our neighbor came back by with a box full of apples from her apple tree, so I had to figure out what to do with them. I made, apple cinnamon kielbasa, which surprisingly was good, apple pork chops, apple crisp, apple sauce, and an apple pie. I even made the crust from scratch–first time ever. However, one turned out too hard and the other one turned out too soft. Can you sense a Goldilocks and the Three Bears theme here? Yeah, well, I didn’t go for a third time to get it just right. Instead, I improvised. I rolled out the hard crust as best I could and laid it in the pie pan, and then cut stripes from the soft crust and placed them on top of the apple pie filling, like a cobbler. And you know what? It came out beautifully, and. . . . Bonus. The crust was truly yummalicious.

After I made all of that, there was still more than half a box of apples left *big sigh*.

What in the world was I going to do with the rest of them?

Sure I could make apple butter and come up with more recipes with apples in it, but honestly, I was kinda getting burned out on it. I mean, if I had to I would. I wasn’t about to waste all those yummy organic apples. But then Kevin surprised me, and took that trivial concern of mine away.

On Saturday, I ventured out of the computer room, into the kitchen, and found him slicing the rest of the apples over the sink, dumping them in a colander. This was after he had already made the stewed tomatoes. Yeah, he was a busy little beaver, moving around with his cute self with the intention of storing it for the long winter. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was going to boil and freeze them.

Hey, that works for me.

Now, so far, we have in our freezer: rhubarb, stewed tomatoes, apple pie, and apples. We also have homemade chicken broth and chicken soup that was made before we received our bounty of harvest food.

It’s nice having fresh, organic food in the freezer whenever we can manage it. One day I would love to live in a place where I could get it all the time, along with fresh seafood. But for now, I’ll appreciate what I can get here because really, it’s pretty damn cool living in farm country where most everybody generously, including us, shares the food they’ve created with their own bare hands.

It’s pretty damn cool if you ask me, but it’s not like I haven’t already said that. :)