All the Ingredients

Final Harvests

It is 36 degrees outside and snowing puffy flakes that won't stick. The tomato plants have all turned brown and flopped over. The giant shrub of parsley has finally succumbed to the cold and deflated into a flat circle in the flower bed. It's the third week of November and the last tomato was just picked ten days ago. The weather has gone from end of summer to winter with not much autumn in between.

But for the last two weeks I have been harvesting and putting up the end of the garden produce. I have dried countless batches of oregano, parsley, lavender, sage, and basil in the food dehydrator. I harvested twenty small to medium onions that are hanging in the basement, and dried several batches of leeks diced into small pieces. I also slit, seeded and dried eight jalapeno peppers--the crop was much larger than that but we ate a lot of them in salsas. I made many batches of tomato sauce for the freezer.

I harvested roughly two dozen stumpy carrots. They were on the side of the garden not washed out by the summer's flood, but still they seemed to suffer from stunted growth. I am enjoying them, but they taste a little too much like dirt for the rest of the family. They will be finished off as the Thanksgiving carrot salad next week.

And then there were the sweet potatoes.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. I found the plants--a dozen for $2.27 at the hardware store greenhouse--and thought I would give them a try. I love sweet potatoes. I dug a bed for them, and spaced the plants out with about eight inches in between them. They grew. And they grew. Like last summers pumpkins, the vines spread out and tried to take over. But the potatoes were growing underground, and the vines were easily trimmed back with the mower when they encroached too far on the lawn, so they were not too invasive. They grew into the arbor vita shrubs behind the bed where they were planted and out the other side. When I finally pulled the vines up, some of them were more than twelve feet long.

I had put black plastic down around all my plants, with grass clippings over the top to keep it down. When I pulled up the vines and then the plastic, the potatoes were hiding just under the surface around the main stem into the ground. Each vine produced three to four potatoes. BIG potatoes. I gave some away and wrapped the rest in newspaper and put in the basement. They will be baked in the oven and mashed. I add a little butter and ginger and freeze them in one-cup containers. We will have mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, as well as sweet potato rolls.

For these I use a potato bread recipe out of Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, and substitute mashed sweet potatoes for the mashed white potatoes the recipe calls for. This was done one Thanksgiving several years ago when I realized that I only had enough white potatoes to mash for dinner, and not enough to use for the rolls. I thawed some mashed sweet potatoes from the freezer and made the dough using those. Everyone raved about the rolls that year, and I have made them that way ever since. Last year my son walked through the kitchen and caught me mixing up the dough with the mashed sweet potatoes. He doesn't like them, and said that I was ruining the rolls and he wouldn't eat any at dinner. He ate nine. 

There is still a basket of Roma tomatoes on the table ranging from green to almost overripe. We are slicing them on pizza, adding them to salads, and trying to use them all up. There are many containers of tomato sauce in the freezer, onions, sweet potatoes, frozen packs of rhubarb and our first small strawberries, and lots of dried herbs waiting to be used as seasonings all winter--the dried sage will go nicely in the cornbread stuffing for the turkey. In spite of the flood and all the rain that took out the beans, cucumbers, and the beets, it was a good year for the garden. We will have a lot to be Thankful for next Thursday.

Retro Dutch Apple Pie

Recently I was working my way through a lug of Colorado peaches by making a number of peach pies for the freezer. (Warm peach pie tastes great in front of the fire on a cold Iowa January day.) I found myself left with only enough pie dough for a bottom crust. I had a lovely bowlful of Cortland Apples that I had gotten at the farmers market, and decided to make my mom's Dutch Apple Pie. It has a crumb topping and only needs dough for the bottom crust.

I rolled out the dough while the oven preheated to 425 degrees, and peeled and sliced nine small to medium apples.I had never tried Cortlands before this fall. They are grown at the local Honey Creek Acres, and were recommended to me by the lady who sold them at the market as her "new favorite eating apple." The fruit of these apples is pure white, with a nice crunchy texture that doesn't break down in a pie. I had made applesauce of the first batch I had bought, cooking the apples with the red skins still on. They produced the most lovely pink applesauce.

Following my mother's recipe, to the sliced apples I added:

• 1/4 C sugar (the recipe calls for 1/2 C, but these apples don't need a lot of extra sugar)

• 1/2 t nutmeg

• 1 t cinnamon

• 2 1/2 T lemon juice

• 2 T flour

Once I had mixed all the ingredients, I heaped the coated apple slices into the pie shell. Then I mixed up the crumb topping (what my mother's recipe called the "Dutch part" of the pie). It consisted of:

• 1/2 C flour

• 1/2 C sugar

• 1 stick butter, at room temperature

Mix the flour and sugar, and cut it into the butter to make thick crumbs. Then place the crumbs evenly over the apples in the crust. (It was very warm in my kitchen and the crumbs were a bit gooey.)

Then (and this is the really weird part of this recipe) you slide the pie into a clean brown grocery bag, being careful that the pie pan is in the center of the bag and not touching the sides. Staple the bag closed, place it on a cookie sheet, and slide the pie-in-bag onto a rack in the oven that has been lowered enough so that the top of the brown grocery bag doesn't touch the top of the oven. Bake the pie one hour.

Now when the pie first starts to bake, your kitchen will smell like baking grocery sack, and you will be sure the entire bag is going to burst into flames in such a hot oven. Mine never has. And after about ten minutes, the smell goes away.

After baking the pie for an hour, slide the pie--still in the bag--onto a rack to cool. When you can easily handle the pie (but it's still a little warm), take it out of the bag and enjoy a slice with some vanilla ice cream on top.

I don't usually make pies with this much butter and sugar anymore. I like to taste the fruit without much more than crust, but we enjoyed this apple pie a lot. My mother didn't bake a lot of pies (that was my area of expertise), but we always had fun with this recipe. It also works well with peaches or strawberries. You just want enough fruit to mound into the pie pan, so that when it cooks down, it's a good ratio to this sweet topping.

 

Tomato Sauce

Well, it doesn't look like I will get much corn out of our garden. Someone (a raccoon perhaps?) has been systematically pulling the ears off the stalks--even the baby, half-formed ones--and eating them. I go out every morning to find the cobs, husks pulled back, cleaned of kernels. But whoever is dining on my corn doesn't like tomatoes.

I picked approximately two batches of a hundred each last week, mostly the Romas, but also some of the yellow and pinks (can't find the plastic name tag under the vines), and the Big Boys. To make my basic sauce, I cleaned and chopped the tomatoes in halves or quarters, depending on their size, and threw them in a pot with chopped up zucchini and onions. The first zucchini I picked were the large ones, so it only took one per pot. I think that the onions and the zucchini round out the flavor of the tomatoes, and give the finished sauce a smoother texture.

I cooked this mixture until all the vegetables were soft, and then ran it through it through what is now called a "vintage" food mill--an aluminum cone in a stand with a wooden pestle. I bought this one at the hardware store the first time I ever made cranberry sauce after I moved to Iowa because it's the kind my mother used. Now food mills have flat bottoms and handles that spin the food through. The sauce at this point was very thin. I added fresh basil leaves and a stalk of oregano from the garden and simmered the sauce for more than an hour. Then I scooped out the herbs, added a bit of salt and red wine.

At this point, the sauce is just the right consistency for tomato soup. I ladled some out to take to work to eat that way. It is great soup with a little cream and some croutons added. I personally prefer mine with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole grain bread for dunking. Then I put the pot back on the burner and continued to simmer it under the sauce in the pot is reduced by about half. I could can the sauce at this point, but not having a lot of time, I packaged it in different size containers for spaghetti sauce or homemade pizza, and froze it.

I hope to have enough tomatoes to make two more batches next week. Nothing is quite as heartening in the Iowa winter deep freeze as the taste of that fresh tomato sauce.

Garden Salsa

The first tomatoes are finally ready in the garden. I also have onions and herbs, so I decided to make salsa.

Now, I spent most of my precollege years in Phoenix. This was back in the days before salsa became trendy and was made out of mangoes or pineapple or peaches. I am stodgy when it comes to salsa. I want a tomatoes base. To me, the other concoctions are fruit relishes.

I also am not a big fan of chunks of onion or large fronds of cilantro. I could be wrong, but I don't think cilantro was a common salsa ingredient in Phoenix in the 1960s. It certainly wasn't an herb my mother ever used, and she was a pretty adventurous cook. So yesterday, with fresh ingredients from my garden, and within my picky parameters, I came up with a frisky salsa.

First I sliced up a sweet yellow onion. I hadn't planned to harvest most of the onions this early, but more than a dozen of them had pushed themselves halfway out of the soil. Obviously, I need to plant them deeper next summer. So now I have a nice braid of drying, lemon-sized onions.

I added a diced clove of garlic to the onion and sauteed them in olive oil until just soft. In the food processor, I combined chunks of yellow and red tomatoes from the garden, along with some parsley and cilantro. After several pulses, I added the onions, garlic, and some sea salt. Then I diced up and threw in the first jalapeno from the garden. I am new to enjoying spicy heat in my food. I know that many people don't consider jalapenoss to be very hot, but the salsa had quite a lot of zip for me. And the onion and garlic flavors were there but muted. A new family favorite recipe!

Sweet Corn

There are pluses and minuses to living in Iowa. In the last six months, we've had too many minuses. We had a long and awful winter with too much snow and ice. At one point, most of the folks in our area were without electricity for three days, the result of a nasty ice storm. We bought a house with a fireplace so we would have someplace to hang the Christmas stockings and have been grateful for it every winter. A wet spring led into what will now be recorded in our memories and the history books as "The Flood of 2008." We bought a house on a hill because it came with an acre and a half of land. It also happens to be far enough from the lake that surrounds our rural subdivision on three sides, to never be in danger of flooding. Recovery in our part of Iowa will be very slow. Favorite restaurants are gone and won't return. Other businesses have relocated. And many people were washed completely out of their homes, neighborhoods, and towns, and have to start over again.

A lot of people lost their gardens. I was lucky. I only lost my beans which came up and rotted in the wet soil. I replanted, just to have it happen again. A lot of farmers in this area lost all or part of their corn fields. Even now, there's been enough rain that some of these fields remain shallow lakes. I drove by one adjacent to the interstate recently that had a fallen tree along one edge that was covered in snowy egrets. Perhaps they thought they had gotten to Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, a little sooner this summer. It was consoling to think that such beautiful birds have stopped to rest in a spot that's beauty this time of year should have come from tall green corn sporting a crown of tassels.

I have my own small strip of corn in my garden this year. I haven't planted corn in over a decade because we live on the top of a hill, and the tall corn plants are vulnerable to the strong rains and hail storms of the average Iowa summer. My small crops were always broken down before they could produce anything. Since I have my garden in our protected side yard this summer, I thought I would give corn another try. Due to the wet spring, the plants emerged at different times and are at different heights, like two blended families with lots of children. So far we have four ears of corn developing. If that's all we get, everyone in the family will get to eat one, and it will have been a successful experiment.

But one of the pluses of living in Iowa arrived on time this week, in this long, hard summer. Sweet corn. I was driving past the parking lot next to the vacuum cleaner repair shop, and there was a rusted red pickup truck with a striped awning over the back, filled almost to overflowing with ears of sweet corn, just picked that morning. A farmer cheerfully filled a plastic grocery sack with twelve large ears for five dollars. I took them home, and served them boiled, with butter and salt, for dinner that night along with hamburgers off the grill. Easily my favorite summer meal. The corn was sweet and crunchy, and we ate seconds, butter running down our fingers.

There are a lot of things I would never buy out of pick up in a parking lot, but in Iowa, in late July and August, I will always stop for sweet corn. This year, it's a sight just as beautiful as the snowy egrets.

At the Farmers' Market

Our small town has tried several times to establish a farmer's market. The first year it consisted ofthree men who showed up on Thursday nights to sell fruit and vegetables out of their pickup trucks in the parking lot next to the ballpark. The offerings were basic: corn, tomatoes, beans, onions, and melons. After about six weeks, no one showed up anymore. The second year, the location was the same, and the vendors different. Again it didn't last the summer.

This year the farmer's market was moved to Sunday afternoon behind the town's rec center. This was a smart move. Not only is this location within biking and walking distance of more of the town, but it also attracts the rec center traffic--patrons who have come to work out, or to use the pool, the library, or the playground.

The first week there were four vendors. The gentleman with fresh pork and vegetables from his farm, the lady who had just opened her own herb shop in town and who gardens and bakes, the family selling elk meat and elk leather goods, and the lady selling home-made baked goods. That first week I bought tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuces. Glorious tomatoes! It had been such a wet, nasty spring that the tomatoes had been grown in a hot house. But I ate one everyday for week--often in a salad with the lettuce and cucumbers.

Four weeks later there were twice as many vendors with kohlrabi, potatoes, early onions, tiny strawberries, the end of the rhubarb and the radishes, and the beginning of pea pods and sugar snaps. There were two more ladies selling pastries and fresh fruit pies, and two other ladies selling their handmade jewelry. Then followed the two wonderful weeks of the sour cherry harvest. I couldn't get enough fruit either week to make a cherry pie, so I started hunting for crisp recipes. I turned to a cookbook I had just bought, Deborah's Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets, just out this spring in paperback. In this book, she describes farmers' markets all over the U.S. and gives recipes grouped by what you will find in these markets seasonally. There's a great recipe in the book for a "Apricot-Cherry Crisp."

I didn't have any apricots or the sweet cherries the recipe called for, but the sour cherries worked great. The recipe calls for only two tablespoons of sugar to be added to roughly one pound of cherries. I increased this to a quarter cup for my two pints of sour cherries. I combined that with two tablespoons of minute tapioca and a dash of almond extract and poured into a buttered 8-inch square glass baking dish. Then I followed the crisp topping recipe exactly as Madison has it, and worked together six tablespoons unsalted butter, three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar, two-thirds of a cup of flour, and a dash each of salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I baked it at 375 degrees until the juices from the cherries almost bubbled over the edge of the pan--about 30 minutes. We ate it warm out of the oven with a good french vanilla ice cream scooped on top. In the last two weeks, I have found nice sweet cherries and apricots (not indigenous to my local farmers' market) and made the recipe exactly as it appears in Madison's book. It's excellent. The apricots and cherries play off each other nicely, and barely need any sugar, as sweet as they are.

Last Sunday, the farmers' market had swelled to over twenty vendors, each with a colored tent to protect them from the harsh midday sun. As I pulled up, families were getting out of their vans to shop, kids and dogs in tow. It finally looked like a "market," busy with shoppers.There were melons, green beans, beets, sweet corn, peppers, potatoes, and squash of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The herb lady who has been there every week is now selling her hand-crafted breads and pastas as well as her herbs. The pork farmer still has his freezer of various cuts of meat (they are right next to the folks who sell the frozen cuts of elk), and his vegetables have expanded as well. My refrigerator is full and it's time to hunt for more recipes.

Eating Summer

Back in September, I posted about preserving the harvest. I talked about vegetables, herbs, and fruit--from my garden and the farmer's market--that I put by in a number of ways for the winter. And my, what a winter it has been! The total after last Wednesday's snowfall was almost 60 inches of snow in my area of the Iowa weather map. The yard and garden have been buried completely since before Christmas, and the snow just keeps piling up. I see the picnic table, and, longing, for summer, realize that it will be awhile before I sit there in the sun with a good book and a glass of wine.

But we have been eating the summer, from the freezer and the cupboard, since the first of January--my random date for starting to enjoy the fruits of 2007. A few notes on what worked and didn't work.

Frozen vegetables: Recently I made my corn, tomato, and black bean soup, using corn from the freezer that I had blanched on the cob last July and sliced off into bags and sealed. The corn was fabulous--it tasted like it had just been harvested and wasn't the least bit mushy. The asparagus that I blanched and froze, however, was mushy when recooked. I am not sure if I blanched it too long, or reheated it too long. I will have to try another sealed pouch and see.

Dried Fruit: I made this for snacking and it has been very good. The apples and the peaches and nice and chewy, but the watermelon was sublime. It had a chewy texture, like fruit leather, and a more powerful flavor than the peaches or apples. I will dry much more of this next summer since I have devoured what I already had. I have been throwing the dried tomatoes in any number of breads and other dishes. They were a very nice addition to a batch of crock pot pulled pork.

Dried Herbs: These have turned out predictably well. I like the dried rosemary on meats and breads, but I have had the most fun experimenting with the sage which I had never grown or used before. Now I automatically reach for it when cooking any kind of poultry. I like to grind the sage leaves in the mortar with sea salt and use it as a rub.

Freezer Jam: The peach freezer jam I made has a wonderful flavor, but is very watery once opened. You have to put it on bite-by-bite or it actually make your toast soggy. It was a quick way to save a lot of peaches from spoiling and going to waste right before Labor Day weekend, but next year I will definitely go back to canning jam the regular way. In the meantime, I am saving a jar to use as part of my next ham glaze with chutney in Nigella's recipe--maybe for Easter.

Frozen Pies: I have been freezing pies since we first got our large freezer some 20 years ago. I have learned that it works better to bake them most of the way, and then freeze them. This week we baked back to life a ginger-peach pie made from our own peaches. As is the case with frozen pies, the crust was not as perky as it had been originally, and the peaches were softer, but the pie tasted of warm summer nonetheless. It was gone in the span of just a few days.

The thing I am really longing for these days is to be able to fire up the charcoal grill. I want a juicy hambuger, a charred hotdog, some grilled vegetables, or a slab of pork back ribs. Unfortunately, we will need many more warm days before the grill and the smoker are free from their snowbank. And I have learned my lesson about not putting them away in the shed when I take care of the garden hoses. If the groundhog was right, maybe we will start to see more thaw in another two weeks.

First Frost

We have been gone on vacation, and have come home to the threat of first frost. Even though I ought to have been doing laundry today, I decided that the garden needed some attention. Since the leaves on the pumpkin vines that had spent the summer over running the side yard were starting to turn brown, I decided that it was time to pull the vines and harvest our crop of mini-pumpkins.

This involved grabbing the end of a vine and peeling it up from the long grass, like pulling on the end of a snarled garden hose. Strung along the length like Christmas lights were the small orange pumpkins. I was able to harvest some in mid-air, but others popped off the vine and rolled back into the tall grass. Once I tracked each vine back to the base plant, I cut it off for the burn pile. This was hard work. The grass obscured portions of the vines, and tried to hang on as I wrenched the vines up in the air. Pumpkins popped every which way like beads off a necklace.

After I had pulled up all the vines, I waded carefully through the tall grass, hunting mini-pumpkins like errant Easter eggs. I pulled and I yanked, and I yanked and I pulled. As I collected the pumpkins, I lined them up in rows across the top of the weathered, rickety picnic table. Kirby, our large cranky black and white cat, patrolled the benches back and forth, upset because I was filling up her table-top sunning spot.

When I was finished , I counted: twelve dozen mini-pumpkins of assorted sizes and shades of orange.  Along the way I found the missing zucchini vine sporting a large marrow shaped like an inflated cucumber.  Zucchini vines are supposed to be so prolific, yet this was only the third squash I had harvested off this vine. My husband's theory is that the pumpkin vines sucked all the energy from the other things I planted. The pumpkin vines certainly overran the carrots, but I found the beets, at least four of them still going strong. And the eggplant has an odd cant to it, as purple oblongs pull it in two different directions. The onions and the herbs are still going strong, the blossoming fennel waving frowzily, scenting the garden air with her licorice perfume. I suppose I should have pulled the bulb by now, but I know no one will like it but me, and I like her woozy presence in the yard.

The big surprise of the afternoon was finding four bean plants, low to the fence, sporting enough green and purple string beans for a meal. After the first harvest months ago, I would have assumed they were done, but they seem to have been protected from the summer heat by large pumpkin leaves. Heaven knows the tomatoes didn't bear well. The plants are at least two feet shorter than last year's. I have gotten about a half dozen small Roma's and not much else, although the Big Boy's are now covered with fruit. The yellow tiny plum tomatoes, the sports that came up from last year, are bearing like mad, and I can pick handfuls to eat every day. But there has not been the bounty of sauce tomatoes I had hoped for. The big surprise was that I found three pumpkins of more normal proportions, survivors from the one Spooky Pumpkin vine I planted. They are small by Halloween pumpkin standards, and one is still green, but they will be fun to carve anyway.  I found a pumpkin cookbook with directions for roasting the minis. I will have to try it and see what comes from it. If nothing else, we will have plenty of decorations for Halloween.

Canning

When we moved into our house after we got married, I finally had room to can and preserve food, thanks to ample storage space in the basement and a 35-cubic foot freezer that my in-laws gave us when they moved south from Minnesota to Texas. When I had asked about general canning instructions, my mother, the first source of all kitchen wisdom, told me to get a Ball Blue Book and follow the directions in there for water bath canning.  I stuck mostly to preserves and butters--usually made with peach. I made some pickled peppers and green beans, but never really got into canning tomatoes. Nor did I ever can any meat items. (Possibly because I was scared by Vienna Sausages as a small child.) I also read the section on freezing and froze fruit while it was in season. My edition from 1977 got me though years and years of hot water bath canning, freezing, and preserving.

After my husband's grandmother passed away, his family cleaned out her apartment and he brought me a leftover box of kitchen supplies that nobody else had wanted. Along with a notebook of recipes, I discovered The Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving Receipts, issued by the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Co. of Muncie, Indiana, copyrighted 1915. It explains several methods of caning that utilized the new Ball "Perfect Mason" jars and the ball "Sure Seal" jars, and that involved canning in a syrup that filled the jars up to the rubber seal on the lids. The most fascinating part of this book is the recipes for foods that may have been common closer to the beginning of the 20th century, but which you never hear about anymore. Foods such as Crab Apple Catsup (seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, pepper, salt, and vinegar), Pickled Grapes, Spiced Celery, and Tomato Mustard (from the description it sounds like catsup with the addition of mustard and curry powder). What would my husband's grandmother have served Spiced Celery with? As an accompaniment to meat?

The scariest part of the 1915 version of the Ball Blue Book is the section on the care of fruit trees, bushes, and vines. It goes into great detail about the preparation of contact insecticides to use against "sucking insects." Kerosene Emulsion is recommended, as is Arsenate of Lead. Of course, my father kept an old coffee can of DDT in the garage that he spread around the outside base of our house when the bugs got too bad.  The bugs died, and none of us ever got malaria .

But the overriding idea of the early Ball Blue Book is that it's important to can fruit and vegetables at the peak of their harvest to preserve their nutrients. This became a matter of concern to me last week when a friend of mine presented me with a lug of gorgeous Colorado peaches. We ate them, we made more pies, and I decided to make some peach jam.

I went out and bought a new copy of the Ball Blue Book, and discovered that Ball Corporation no longer produces canning products. It sold that arm of its company to the Jaden Corporation. The new Blue Book contains the usual sections on water-bath canning, pressure cooker canning, and low sugar preparations for people on special diets. It also includes a new type of preserving--freezer jams. Since I was in a hurry to make peach jam before we went out of town for a long Labor Day weekend, this is the method I chose to try.

Unlike a regular jam, freezer spreads aren't cooked. I simply cut up three cups of peaches, added 1 1/2 cups sugar and a box of the "freezer jam pectin," and let it all sit for half an hour before putting it in the new Ball screw-lid plastic freezer containers. In just an hour, I had made ten containers of peach jam that went into the freezer after setting up for half an hour. When we came back from vacation and thawed some out to try this week, my husband pronounced it delicious. The only thing I don't like is that the freezer jams, since they aren't cooked, don't take on that clear, jewel-like color that processed jams and jellies have. The peach jam I made is opaque--but the fruit looks and tastes fresh so that is good. But it won't make good gifts for friends unless they live nearby.

Early Harvest

I have been thinking about fruit and canning lately because it is harvest time in my garden, and I have been putting things by for several weeks now. The first thing I packaged last spring was local asparagus (the leftover from several bunches of local product that I didn't devour). I steamed it with some freshly shredded ginger, and froze three good-size pouches of it in my Seal-A Meal bags. No one else in my house eats asparagus, so I will enjoy it myself over the winter, or bring it out for Thanksgiving which we always host for friends.

The next crop we had to deal with were the peaches from our tree. My husband, Scot, wanted to cut the tree down early last spring because it had suffered ice damage and broken branches several years ago and looked pretty ragged--rather like a peach tree designed by Tim Burton. But it budded out, and one day when I was mowing, I noticed that its blossoms had turned to small, fuzzy fruit, the first it had born in three years. We watched the peaches grow, and one late July afternoon my daughter Emily came in and announced that the peaches were ripe and starting to fall off the tree. She sampled one from the ground (not already nibbled by deer) and pronounced it sweet.

The peaches were under-size compared to what the tree had produced previously, but since it had recovered enough to bear fruit and save itself from an untimely trip to the wood pile, I was thankful for whatever we got. The first wave of peaches we peeled and ate. That's the whole point of growing your own food, right? You eat it and eat it. Then it became a race for the peaches before the deer got them all. Sunny, our large orange striped cat, actually charged a group of young deer peach-steelers in the yard one afternoon, causing them to take flight. So Scot made two large batches of pie crust, and peeled peaches, and I baked pies. Over the course of two weeks, we ate two and froze four.  I have been experimenting with ginger this spring and summer, so I added some crystallized ginger to some of the pies. In one of the pies we ate right away, the ginger was so subtle, I almost couldn't taste it. I don't know if the flavor will hold up at all when I bake/thaw the others.

About ten years ago, we had two bearing peach trees and two bearing apple trees and fall harvest was a time of freezing peaches in pouches and as pies, and apples as sauce and pies. I have quite the collection of battered metal pie tins that I freeze pies in since I think they bake/thaw better after they have been baked the first time just short of a nice brown on the top crust. This year I discovered that once the pies were frozen, I could slide them into their own large Seal-A-Meal bags and seal them that way. With autumn apple and pumpkin pies, it will be at least January before we bake and eat one of this year's peach pies, so I will be interested in seeing how well the extra care with packaging keeps them. And if the ginger flavor is there.