Fall Feasting

When I pulled all of the tomato plants out of the garden a couple of weeks ago, I was left with a BUNCH of green tomatoes.

So we did with them what anyone should do with green tomatoes, we made fried green tomatoes!

Served with Remoulade Sauce

I dried some more of my herbs, this time Rosemary.

I went ahead and pulled the pumpkin plant out because it froze, so the garden is now empty, but my counter is full of white pumpkins - I actually gave another good sized one to my parents!

A friend gifted us with an enormous maitake (hen-of-the-wood) mushroom.  I froze 2 lbs of it, and after one meal of delicious friend shrooms, I have another mess to fry up left in the fridge.

After a couple of days of rain, most of the leaves have fallen, so it's becoming more sad looking around here.  Now we just need some snow to cover up the ugly bits!

Asia Flew

I'm sipping my mug of peach tisane (we are trying to insert this word into our vocabulary when having herbal "tea",) staying warm inside and knowing that the temperature is dropping outside (and there might even be snow on Wednesday!)  I'm ready for it - we got our firewood stacked over the weekend, and I finished taking everything out of the garden today.

All that's left in there are my blueberries and strawberries, and a pumpkin plant.

I still need to finish cleaning out my flower beds, but I thought that the Solomon's Seal looked beautiful in the sunshine yesterday!

The trees lining our driveway have so many colors this year, it's gorgeous!

The one thing that I can't stand about Fall is the return of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs (I refer to them as THE MINIONS,) an invasive species from Asia.  This Fall has been particularly bad - when it is sunny out, the sides of our house and the soffits are covered with literally thousands of them.  Typically they find their way inside the house as well, and are loud and annoying when they fly around, but so far (knock wood) they haven't been bad in the house.  We have been super diligent about checking all the doorways when we go in or out lately to try to keep it this way!  This year, JP found a spray at Walmart, which seems to be significantly reducing the number of these nasties crawling around.  DEATH TO THE MINIONS!

Right before the weekend, I got hit with the bad cold that L had last week.  Numerous COVID tests have been negative, so this seems to be the garden variety corona virus, but it hit when I was not yet back 100% after surgery, so I'm still feeling pretty tired and congested.  Ugh.  Stay well y'all!

Swiss Miss

The rainbow swiss chard in my garden did amazing this year.  Since we had some frost here over the past 2 nights, I harvested most of it before the weekend.  I actually got a kiddie pool full of chard (this is only half of it!)

This stuff grew to massive proportions!

I have already blanched and frozen 5 lbs of it:

John cooked 4 lbs of it southern style with onion, garlic and a ham bone.

Last night we ate a bunch in this delicious pasta that I adapted from a NYT recipe.

Creamy Linguine with Swiss Chard

16 oz linguine

5 T butter

1/2 c panko crumbs

3/4 lb of swiss chard, stems sliced thin and leaves cut into smaller pieces

2 leeks (I used one large onion, sliced thin)

4 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tsp fresh thyme

1 filet anchovy, chopped

2 c broth

1 c heavy cream

3/4 c parmesan, grated

Italian seasoning, salt, pepper

-Melt 2 T butter in a skillet and add panko.  Season with salt, pepper and Italian Seasoning and toast until golden brown.  Set aside.

-Melt 3 T butter in the skillet and add onion, chard stems, anchovy, garlic and thyme and sauté until soft and onions are translucent.

-Add broth and cream and bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer for 10 min.

-Cook pasta and drain, then return to pot and add chard mixture.  Slowly stir in parmesan until creamy.  Serve with toasted breadcrumbs.

This weekend I also made some of my secret ingredient apple sauce to freeze.  It feels amazing to put food away for the winter months!

Enjoy your food adventures!

If I Could Save Thyme in a Bottle...

 Oh wait, I did that!

I harvested, cleaned and dried a bunch of thyme from my herb garden, along with more oregano.  I also counted - I have frozen 15 pints of corn from our garden, canned a couple of jars of tomatoes, frozen 3 quarts of tomato soup and 4 quarts of asparagus soup, as well as 6 pints of pasta sauce and numerous gallons of blueberries.  I also canned blueberry jam and pears.  I didn't do all this in the past couple of weeks - this is the accumulation of the season's harvest so far.

Actually, all I accomplished over the past week was having surgery!  I woke up around 2 AM on Wednesday morning with severe belly pain that landed me in the local ER (for 30 hours) with a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis, got me an ambulance ride to the tertiary hospital north of us, and gallbladder surgery on Friday.  I'm still pretty sore and tired, but at least I'm home and have been able to eat (in all that time in the hospital - Wednesday at 3 AM until Saturday at 11 AM - I was only given one meal although I did get some jello and ginger ale the night before surgery) and actually get some uninterrupted sleep!  I actually also read 2 books and did 3 hours of continuing education while in the hospital - that's pretty good, right?

When I feel like I can lean over comfortably, I will have to go see what's left in the garden - I'm sure we have lost a bunch of over ripe tomatoes, but the chickens will enjoy them.

J and her friend are coming home from college for a long weekend starting Friday.  Here's looking forward to a pain-free weekend with them!