Autumn, Squash, and Pumpkins (Oh my!)

I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

~Anne Shirley

The rapture over Autumn seems to have ramped up in recent years, what with Pinterest Printables and Pumpkin-Spice Everything. It's to the point where it seems almost cliche to declare one's love for it. But I really and truly do adore it, to my very core. I even bestowed Autumn to my daughter as a middle name, though she was born in March. 

Elisabeth Autumn: not afraid of patterns

Do you believe me now?

Of course, an obvious symbol and byproduct of Autumn are Pumpkins. Last year we had so many pumpkins that we did not even visit a pumpkin patch or purchase any at the store. It was very satisfying to carve our own pumpkins and decorate with our own Jack-be-littles and small "Sugar" pumpkins. But this year, the "Big Max" variety I planted did absolutely nothing. In fact, all they produced were two weird, gourdy, warty, pumpkins and it made me think that something was wrong with the starts I bought. So, a trip to the pumpkin patch was definitely needed to obtain carving pumpkins. 

Carving pumpkins is one of those traditional activities that Caleb and I dread each year because of the parental-labor involved. Often you'll find us October 30th frantically carving because we've realized we cannot put it off any longer. But this year, we put Graham to bed, so right away we were down to four. Britton was finally old enough to carve his own (see the Minecraft Creeper below) and we only allowed Rosie to get one big enough for eyes. That left us with really only two that we had to carve, and by "we", I mean Caleb. But I was on guts-duty and spent an hour sorting and washing pumpkin seeds to roast, so I think the division of labor was fairly equal. 

I've realized the key to perfect pumpkin seeds is delayed gratification. We always want to roast them the night we carve, but they need to dry for at least two days. Otherwise they will not crisp up. 

Our favorite pumpkin seed recipe:
Rinse 4 cups pumpkins seeds and lay to dry on a wax-paper lined baking sheet
Stir together:
4 Tbs melted butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 Tbs worcestershire sauce
1 tsp garlic salt
Pour over pumpkin seeds, stirring to coat
Bake at 300 for 45-60 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes


What I did manage to grow this year was a nice harvest of Butternut Squash and Sugar Pumpkins.

Butternut Squash are a winter squash and so can be stored for several months.
In July I actually just used the final squash from last year, though the texture was a bit spongy. It was still useable for pureeing. This year I picked 20 beautiful squash.

In order to store Butternut Squash, they must be cured. This concentrates the fruit's natural sugars, making them taste sweeter and also reducing the chance of rot. Curing is done by picking the squash and then allowing them to sit in a warm location with good air flow. Caleb built me this frame and I put it in our garage, which gets pretty warm on those Indian Summer days we had in September.

After a couple of weeks, I then move them to the unfinished part of our basement which stays consistently cool and doubles as my root cellar.

We have two favorite ways to use Butternut Squash. We simply call this first recipe "Winter Soup" and it is a cool-weather staple in our house. I serve it with bread, sometimes broiled with cheese on top, and it is pure comfort. 

Golden Winter Soup (from Cooking Light Magazine)
Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter 
5 cups (1/2-inch) cubed peeled butternut squash (about 1 1/2 pounds) 
2 cups (1/2-inch) cubed peeled russet potato (about 12 ounces) 
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 cups sliced leek (about 2 medium)
4 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth 
1 cup half-and-half 
3 tablespoons chopped chives

Preparation: 
1. Melt butter in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add squash, potato, salt, and pepper to pan; sauté 3 minutes. Add leek; sauté 1 minute. Stir in broth; bring to a boil. 
2. Reduce heat, and simmer 20 minutes or until potato is tender, stirring occasionally. Place half of potato mixture in a blender. Remove center piece of blender lid (to allow steam to escape); secure blender lid on blender. Place a clean towel over opening in blender lid (to avoid splatters). Blend until smooth. Pour into a large bowl. Repeat procedure with remaining potato mixture. Stir in half-and-half. Cover and keep warm.


Secondly, I have tried many homemade mac and cheese recipes, but have struggled to find one with a smooth texture that was not overly rich. Surprisingly, pureed butternut squash lends perfect texture, gorgeous color, delicious taste, and unsurprisingly, a boost of nutrition to this classic dish.  

Creamy Macaroni and Four Cheeses (from USA Weekend - an unexpected place to find such a keeper of a recipe)

1 (16 ounce) box elbow macaroni
2 (10 ounce) packages frozen pureed winter squash (I roast and puree my own, which is about one large squash)
2 cups low-fat milk
1 1⁄3 cups grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese (4 oz)
2⁄3 cup grated monterey jack cheese (2 oz)
1⁄2 cup part-skim ricotta cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1⁄8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons plain breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon olive oil

Cook macaroni according to package directions.
Drain and transfer to baking dish.
Place frozen squash and milk in a large saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring and breaking up the squash with a spoon until it's defrosted.
Turn heat up to medium and cook until mixture is almost simmering, stirring occasionally.
Remove pan from heat and stir in the cheddar, Jack cheese, ricotta, salt, mustard and cayenne and stir.
Combine bread crumbs, Parmesan and oil in a bowl.
Sprinkle over top of the mac and cheese.
Bake until the cheeses are bubbling around the edges, about 20 mins, then broil for 3 mins so the top is crisp and nicely browned.


Out of my whole garden, I think the think I was most excited about was the 16 Sugar Pumpkins I harvested. 

I grew them last year too but was disappointed in myself for letting them rot before I had done anything with them. For some reason, making my own pureed pumpkin always seemed intimidating and I had only ever used store-bought, canned. But this year I was determined not to be wasteful and reading this post from Oh She Glows gave me the confidence to try it. It is so simple. Each of my 3-4 pound pumpkins yields about 4 cups of puree, roughly the same amount as a large can of pumpkin. When I consider that one of those cans is $3, and I consider that each of my pumpkins also yields seeds that we roast for a healthy snack, and delicious innards and skins that our cows, goats, and chickens love, I feel very satisfied. Pumpkin cannot be safely home-canned, so I simply freeze the puree in one and two cup portions. We use it in just about everything, from waffles to oatmeal to pumpkin bread to an amazing Pumpkin Turkey Chili, which is our traditional Halloween dinner, which incidentally is today.

Tomorrow we will welcome November with all the Holiday anticipation and excitement it has to offer, but today we will savor one last day in this glorious month.

Go Local

He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely, 

but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

~Proverbs 10:5 

One blessing of living in this lush, fertile valley is that whatever we don't grow ourselves, due to lack of space, lack of energy, or a failed crop, is almost always available locally. We have been unsuccessful with blueberries. We will keep trying, but in the meantime, one mile down the road from our house is a blueberry farm where we picked 45 pounds of blueberries this summer. I froze them on cookie sheets and then loaded them into gallon ziplock bags. We will eat them in smoothies, pancakes, and as a plain frozen snack all year long. 

Our strawberries completely failed this year, whereas last year we had a bountiful crop: plenty to eat, plenty to can, and some to freeze. (We have some work to do this winter to get them going again.) Fortunately, we were able to pick at a farm a short drive from us and freeze 20 pounds for the coming year. 

We would like to plant peach trees, but have not yet, so are at least several years out from having our own peaches. Every summer we drive twenty minutes to a local farm and pick by the basketful. 

This year we left with 65 pounds. I canned a bit of peach jam, we made homemade peach ice cream, and ate many plain. But the majority I sliced and froze, with skins on (hate to peel off all those nutrients), to be used in smoothies throughout the year. 

Our favorite smoothie recipe (I triple it for the kids and I):

1 banana
1 sliced peach
1 cup blueberries
1/4 cup plain greek yogurt
1/2 scoop vanilla whey protein powder
1 Tbs almond butter
Almond milk as needed to thin if fruit is frozen

Graham ate his first peach here and is definitely a fan!

At the peach farm, in this very rural location, I was surprised to see an Asian woman on the little wagon taking us out to the orchard. (The orchard owners tired of cars running over their irrigation pipes and so require us to be transported.) She kept staring at us and smiling and I was fairly certain she was Chinese. When we got off at the same stop to pick the same variety of peaches she asked if my children were Chinese. I told her they were and then she hugged me and said, "Thank you." She had a thick accent, but her English was good. We proceeded to have a pleasant conversation in which I discovered she has been here in the States for 6 years and married an American. She hugged me and thanked me no less than three times in our short five-minute conversation. I stressed what a blessing our Chinese children are to us, but she was clearly moved by what we had done. I am always equally moved when Chinese people, who truly understand the desperate plight of the Chinese orphan, share their feelings about our adoptions with us. I believe this moment in a peach orchard in rural Oregon was a sweetly ordained moment by God. 

Though we have six apple trees, we had a very small crop this year. The two that appear to be Gravensteins have only every borne a few apples each season, and the other four (two Golden Delicious and two Red Delicious) were either not pruned enough, pruned too much, or pruned too late in the season. I could tell by the scarcity of blossoms in Spring that we would not have many apples. We also did not follow the prescribed organic spray schedule as we had planned to, so the majority of the apples we did grow were scabby and wormy. Biting into one them was like a game of russian roulette. I would not recommend it. I was able to cut away the yuck and make a fair amount of apple butter, and a few of our Golden Delicious were beautiful for eating. But for the remaining dozens of quarts of applesauce and pints of apple butter, we returned to a place we had not been in a few years: our favorite apple farm, Beilke Family Farms.   

We picked about 70 pounds of Gala, Fuji, and Granny Smith. They were gorgeous. I'd risk biting into one of those any day!  

Last weekend, I got to work, after a welcome month-long break from canning:

I don't think I can adequately express how much of a joy canning on my new stove is, compared to my old, small, ceramic-top stove with a broken large burner, where it would take an hour just to bring my pot to boil.

I wrote last year about my favorite applesauce and apple butter method and recipes and also about the amazing Kitchenaid attachment that makes perfectly textured applesauce. 

We feed the apple scraps to the cows and goats and it feels very satisfying to know absolutely nothing is going to waste. 

I had several quarts of applesauce left from last year, but I opened the last apple butter in July. We shall now make it through another year!

We are very thankful to live in a place where we can so easily live out our beliefs that it is best to buy local, both to support the local economy and also to buy food with the highest nutritional quality (so much is lost during transport and on store shelves) from people who we know are farming their land responsibly. In our VERY modest foray into growing our own (both plants and animals), we are in awe of people who do this for a living. We love Oregon and our local farmers!

                                                                                              

Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes

Someone who plants 30 tomato plants has pretty much forfeited the right to complain about being inundated with tomatoes. So I won't complain. I will just state that the sheer volume was daunting at times. Above is a picture of my harvest twice per week. But considering that my family had not tasted a fresh tomato since the end of our harvest last summer (I refuse to buy tomatoes out of season), they truly were a welcome sight. How did we use them? For starters, we introduced our kids to the delights of Caprese: fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt. Yum! They became fans. Okay, so that used three tomatoes at a time. What else? 

There are two "fresh tomato" recipes that I look forward to making each summer. 

The first is truly the essence of Summer. When I taste it, I always give a little sigh and savor that first bite. Though it is a soup, it is served just slightly warmed, so even during the hottest summer on record in my un-air-conditioned house, I made this several times. The simplicity of the ingredients and the 20 minute prep time always amaze me.  Serve with crusty bread to sop up every last drop.

Warm Tomato and White Bean Stew (from Sunset Magazine)

Ingredients:

Photo Credit: Sunset Magazine

3 pounds ripe tomatoes, rinsed (The riper and redder the tomatoes, the tastier it will be.)
1/2 cup slivered fresh basil leaves
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced or pressed
1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
Fresh-ground pepper
1 can (15 oz.) white beans, drained and rinsed
8 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, drained and cut into cubes (1/2 in.)
1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

Directions:
1. Core and dice tomatoes. In a 4- to 5-quart pan, combine tomatoes, basil, olive oil, garlic, 1 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Let stand until tomatoes are very juicy, about 15 minutes.
2. Set pan over medium-low heat and gently stir in beans. Stir occasionally until mixture is warm to touch, about 5 minutes.
3. Add mozzarella and parmesan cheese. Gently stir just until mozzarella has softened and starts to melt into strings, 2 to 3 minutes. Taste and stir in more salt if desired. Spoon stew into bowls and top each serving with a sprinkling of more basil and parmesan cheese.

Elisabeth has actually requested this for her next birthday dinner in March. Considering that last year she was obsessed with her dislike of tomatoes and was happy that summer was over just so our family would be tomato-free, I consider this a HUGE victory! So I chopped and froze 6 pounds of tomatoes to accommodate. I'm hoping that the texture won't be too compromised. Since the tomatoes break down in the soup, I think it should be fine. I'm sure by March we'll all be ready for a reminder of the summer goodness that awaits us just around the corner.    

The second recipe is the freshest, most delicious spaghetti I've ever had. However, I have to wait for one of those cooler summer day because of all the stove-top cooking involved. 

Spaghetti With Meat Sauce and Mozzarella (from Real Simple magazine)

Ingredients:
12 oz spaghetti
1 TBS olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
kosher salt and black pepper
3/4 pound ground beef chuck
1 Tbs tomato paste
2 lbs beefsteak or plum tomatoes, chopped
6 oz fresh mozzarella, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil

Directions:
1. Cook the pasta according to the package directions; drain and return it to the pot.
2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, garlic, and ½ teaspoon each salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to soften, 3 to 5 minutes.
3. Add the beef and cook, breaking it up with a spoon, until browned, 3 to 5 minutes.
4. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until beginning to soften, 5 to 7 minutes more (add up to ¼ cup water if the pan is dry).
5. Add the beef mixture, bocconcini, and basil to the pasta and toss to combine.


Finally, I canned many quarts and pints of chopped tomatoes and tomato sauce to use in soups and pastas, as well as many pints of salsa. All vegetables must be pressure canned, whereas most fruits have enough acidity on their own to be safely water-bath canned. But just as the age old question asks, is tomato a fruit or vegetable? In terms of PH, the tomato refuses to delare itself, landing squarely in the middle of the spectrum. Thus, tomatoes can be tricky to water-bath can because they are right on the edge of not having enough acidity. Lemon juice or vinegar (for salsas) must be added and very few, if any, alliums (garlic, onions, etc.) can be added because their low  acidity will compromise the safety of a water-bath. It is therefore difficult to home-can a rich, flavorful sauce, so I just make a basic sauce that can be doctored up upon opening of the jar, like the one in Food in Jars, one of my favorite canning books. 

Pounds and pounds of green tomatoes are still on the vine, and I'm debating if I want to ripen them indoors or just be finished with them. In any case, until next summer, I affectionately bid adieu to fresh tomatoes. See you in July!