Local Mushrooms

Here's a great find at the Farmer's Market yesterday: exotic mushrooms cultivated in New Hampshire. The NH Mushroom Company churns out a few hundred pounds each week from their facility in Tamworth, NH. They sell to restaurants and wholesalers, and this past week made an appearance at the Concord Farmer's Market. Chestnut (the brownish ones - like shiitakes, but with a less-chewy stem) and Oyster. Not terribly expensive either at $12-14/lb. A half pound of the chestnut mushrooms, combined with asparagus and tofu, will offer up one of our favorite springtime dishes.

WMUR profiled the company over the winter. Video here, including great video of how they do their growing (bags and bags of woodchips and sawdust!).

Spring Planting

We got some pepper plant seedlings a little while back, and have only just now gotten them into the ground. They did alright sitting on the back steps, but really need some space to grow. They look small next to the enormous spreading leaves of our garlic, but they should catch up before long. B enjoyed helping:


This weekend is the first of the season for the Concord Farmer's market. We hope to score some nice tomato seedlings to put in alongside.

Shrooms

Here is the closest I have ever gotten to seeing mushroom cultivation. This is from the most recent winter farmer's market here in town: a bag full of wood chips, innoculated with some mushrooms transplanted from elsewhere, then left to grow and produce. Holes are punched in the bag for transpiration, the addition of water, and the blooming of "fruit" - the edible part of the mushroom plant.

How Not to Make Oatmeal

Brynna occassionally enjoys having oatmeal for breakfast. She particularly enjoys it with Deen - it's one of the things they do together. Sometimes I attempt it, and Brynna is, usually, receptive.

When I do it, here's what's in it and how I make it:

1. Oats, about 1/3 cup dry


2. A few raisins or craisins for taste


3. boiling hot water


4. stir


5. If using rolled oats (not instant), cook in the microwave for about 20 seconds


6. 1/2 tsp maple syrup


7. 3 T unsweetened soy milk to cool things off and get the consistency right

Mark Bittman, who used to write minimalist recipes and cooking techniques for the NYTimes, has a weekly opinion piece on food policy. This might seem a dry subject, but what we eat, where it comes from, how it's made, and how we eat it is no small matter. In today's piece, Bittman describes the travesty that is McDonald's take on oatmeal. Some of the highlights:

They’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.

I use oats from the bulk food section, possible five cents' worth. My other ingredients are pricier, but the infallable back-of-the-envelope tells me I'm still below $0.40.

“Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

I'll admit that soy milk is hardly a naturally occurring product: it takes some work to turn raw soybeans into a healthful beverage. Even so, I can follow and understand the ingredient list, and the first two are filtered water and organic soybeans. Our maple syrup comes, unsurprisingly, from NH. The cranberries are sweetened, but it's with orange juice.

Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

When Brynna and I want to get crazy, we'll add some chopped walnuts.

Fall Harvest

Today is Saturday, so we were at the farmer's market this morning. It's the last day for the outdoor market; they'll be moving inside to the fairgrounds until the spring. Although the weather was chilly (about 40, with wind, and grey skies horizon to horizon), there was still a tremendous bounty to be had. Behold:


We have cider, apples of two varieties, red peppers from several vendors, parsnips, turnips, red carrots, a single enormous sweet potato, spinach, pumpkins of two (cooking) varieties, a small sweet melon, small potatoes, leeks, garlic, red onions, swiss chard, Amish eggs, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and butternut squash.

Brynna's getting in on the act as well, in these belated 12-week pictures:



We have not only what the market can provide, but a bit from our own garden, too. You may recall we had some success with peppers, and tremendous amounts of basil. Here was our garden a month ago:


The first few frosts have ended the growing season, though. Some of the outermost basil leaves were killed off, and the pepper plants started drooping as well. So, out with all of it. I had already made scads of pesto earlier in the summer, and there simply isn't enough bread, tomatoes, and mozzarella to consume all that basil fresh. So, I spent some two hours plucking the useful leaves from the uprooted basil plants, which were then washed and set out on the sunny porch to dry:



I'm not sure if this dried basil will be at all good, but it's something.

I also pulled the pepper plants and harvested what I could. There were a number of tiny bits that were far from ripe, of which probably nothing will come. I was able to get a half dozen decent sized poblanos, one or two purples, and two enormous-but-not-yet-ripe reds, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends.


These are in addition to some I wrote about earlier in the summer, plus about a dozen or so that I just plucked off for cooking with here and there. So, all-in-all, a pretty successful season for a first time.

Visit from Sara

Our very good friend from college, Sara, came to visit Brynna this past week. We also happened to be there, but mostly Sara was here to see our little girl. We're getting used to that.



We ate very well while she was here. Lacking cable, we had dinner at a nearby tavern so that we could watch game 3 of the ALCS, looking on in horror at how miserably the Sox were doing. The following evening we had some pumpkin ravioli, which I made from scratch the day before, with a roasted red pepper and mustard sauce. Aside from the flour and some olive oil, it is possible that all the ingredients for this meal came from the farmer's market. This is my attempt to recreate a decadent dish I once had at the Fresh Pasta Company in Northampton, MA. According to its recipients it was great. The following evening, Thursday, had us back at Nosh. There aren't any TVs at Nosh, but we kept up on another Sox falling apart via my iPhone. Imagine our surprise, upon returning home, to hear that somehow the Sox had tied it up, and went on to win and force a game 5 (tonight).


Alas, Sara has had to move on to her next social engagement. Too bad, because Hilary has her first work-free weekend in many weeks. We are going to the season opener of the Rochester Symphony Orchestra and Chorale. The program is Beethoven's Big Night, which will include the fifth symphony. Brynna will be left in the able care of one of Hilary's classmates. It is possible that this will be the first date that Hilary and I have had alone since Brynna was born.

Garlic

Anyone who had cooked with us knows that we like to use a lot of garlic. We have a guy at the farmer's market that we get our garlic from, among other things. He has, through selection and careful tending, been able to produce good-sized heads of garlic that have only 4-7 cloves in them. compare that to store-bought, which tends to have 2-3x as much in the same space. Result? Larger cloves that peel very easily and are more convenient for heavy users such as ourselves. Take my word for it, they lose none of their potency for being so large.

This year, before we had basil, parsley, or peppers, we had some garlic. Unfortunately, I didn't read up on it much beforehand, so we planted the cloves around April 1. As it turns out, in northern climes such as ours, it is best to plant garlic, like other bulbs, a few weeks before the ground freezes. This gives them ample opportunity to become established so that, when spring rolls around, they are all set to roar out of the ground like crocuses. As a result of our very late planting, we ended up with garlic heads smaller than walnuts, with cloves just too small to really use. Bummer.

But, we learn from our mistakes. So, yesterday I planted about 15 of these amazing cloves from the market. I had to sacrifice some of the basil plants to make room, but there's no shortage of them so I account it no great loss. Into the dry soil I turned some wet compost from our food scraps before planting. Although it has turned chilly here, they should have over a month to become established before frost. I'll want to water them a fair bit over the next week, and cover them with some of the mountain of leaves that have fallen. [After I did the planting, and in preparing this post, I found out that one does not generally peel the cloves before planting. I'm hoping that this doesn't make much difference.]



Let's hope for good results come next spring.

A video on the subject, for those who are interested. It's dirt simple to do, even for those not accustomed to gardening.

Peppers!

I would not ever claim to be a gardener. I do a little gardening, but I think to claim the title, I would need to have more enthusiasm and aptitude for it. Nevertheless, I must say I am quite proud of this clutch of peppers I harvested from our garden today. We only have one picture-perfect Red Knight so far, but there are a few more on the way. The green ones are Poblano, a slightly hot variety that I am experimenting with sun-drying. The purple ones are, aside from their color, almost the same as ordinary green peppers. The long red ones are Jimmy Nardelo, one of the few chili-type peppers that is sweet, not hot.

There are still many of each variety that are growing and ripening. We'll see how far we can get in the next month or so before we have to start worrying about the frost.

As great as it is to have our own peppers, it is good we are not relying solely on these for the coming winter. We have instead been buying up large amounts at the farmer's market of late, cutting then freezing. Mostly we have focused on sweet red peppers, but have expanded into yellow bananas and the purple ones, which create a nice color blend. We have four or five large ziplocks frozen up already, with perhaps one or two more to come.

The Great Minnesota Get-Together

On Sunday we headed off to the State Fair. Its main claim to fame is that just about any sort of food is available on a stick.

We started off the day with a yummy brunch at the French Meadow bakery:


Then made a brief stop at Twin Cities Green to pick up some more bamboo socks for Brynna:


And finally, on to the park and ride area for the fair. Here we are waiting for the bus:


Once we finally arrived at the fair, we met up with our friend Katie, a Minnesota native, and put ourselves in her capable hands to direct our wanderings. We started at the dairy barn, where Alex and I shared a blackberry malt made with Minnesota milk:


And checked out the butter sculptures of the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contestants, each one carefully carved from a 90-pound block of Minnesota butter:


Across the street was the horticulture building, with the prize veggies:


And giant pumpkins:


And pretty flowers:


There was also crop art, which is made with seeds and grains. We had no idea that crop artists trend Democratic, but there were many anti-Republican and pro-Obama pieces, including this Dr. Seuss-themed one (Thidwick the moose has an annoying elephant living on his head, and all of the little figures surrounding the main picture have little liberal signs):


And this George Bush/Pinocchio scarecrow:


We have no idea why this scarecrow is wearing a Dartmouth hat, but we back it:


Then we wandered across the fairgrounds...


Stopping to take a photo with the moose topiary:


And ended up at the Eco Experience building (that's a 120-foot wind turbine blade):


Brynna then decided it was time for dinner, so we all took advantage of the opportunity to have a bite to eat (us grown-ups had watermelon):


Later on it was sweet potato chips:


Also eaten at the fair by various members of our party:
-fried cheese on a stick
-non-fried cheese stick
-corn dog
-fried pickles
-falafel
-baklava
-strawberry lemonade
-Leinekugel's honey weiss (beer)

We passed up chocolate-covered bacon on a stick, chocolate-covered key lime pie on a stick, spaghetti on a stick, deep fried candy bars on sticks, and a variety of other fair delicacies.

We did, however, visit a bunch of the animal barns, checking out the dairy goats, poultry, horses, and cows.

Eventually, it was time to head home. Once back at the park and ride, Brynna went through a large meal and two diapers before we could buckle her in to her car seat and start the drive. All in all, she seemed to enjoy the festivities, which marked her one-month birthday!

Food, Glorious Food!

We are having a wonderful long weekend, featuring a visit by Aunt Katherine. She has contributed her expertise to the making of baby food for Brynna! Brynna won't start eating solids until at least four months, and probably not until six months, but as there is not much fresh produce in either Minnesota or New Hampshire in February, Kate had the wonderful idea of using the farmers' market bounty to freeze some baby food in anticipation.

So, on Saturday morning, we did an enormous shop at the market, and then got to work peeling, chopping, steaming, pureeing, and freezing. (Actually, Kate did the lion's share of the work, all the credit is definitely hers!) The stove was quite busy:


Here's Kate working on the melon:


So we've ended up with peas, plums, zucchini, yellow squash, red peppers, melon, carrots, and apples. Brynna is such a lucky girl!

In the meantime, Brynna has had her first couple of bottles. As recommended by breastfeeding experts, we held off introducing a bottle until four weeks, but now we want her to get some experience so she's good to go when I head back to school. So I have started pumping after Brynna's morning feeding, and I'm freezing some of that milk for the longer term and also keeping some in the fridge for her to practice on. She had her first bottle while I was out for a run (so as to avoid confusion), but earlier today she was willing to have a bottle while I was around, though I don't feed her myself. I did take a photo:


Brynna is clearly eating quite well...according to our bathroom scale (which is only accurate to the half-pound), she's about eleven pounds now. This increase in weight has had some lovely benefits: she slept for six and a half hours straight last night!

Market Bounty

Things are really starting to pick up at the Farmers' Market. This weekend we picked up a ton of delicious stuff:



Many, many strawberries, as you can see! Some for strawberry shortcake, but most were chopped up and frozen for the rest of the year.

The rest of the goodies were very helpful in dictating our menu for the week. There was beautiful chard for the first time this year, which we had tonight (Pasta with White Beans and Swiss Chard). Lovely tomatoes from the Amish farmer (which will be turned into another pasta dish, along with some of our own basil and sprigs from the new parsley plants). Also a few early carrots, which will spur me to finish up the rest of the carrots left over from last fall (Gingered Carrot Soup with Cashews). We're still getting some asparagus (Asparagus and Shiitakes with Tofu). More of my favorite spinach (yummy salads). Some cilantro, while we're waiting for own stock to grow up a bit (Thai Tofu with Soba Noodles, with the remainder getting tossed into Quinoa Medley with Beans and Corn).

Lunch on a Saturday

Hilary and I had an excellent lunch today, the second time in the last month or so we've been able to enjoy it. Fresh french bread, sliced mozzarella, fresh and local tomatoes, and outstanding olive oil. Think of it as bruschetta al fresca. We could perhaps have had basil leaves, too, but we didn't put any keep any whole ones from the massive pesto wave of this past fall.

Yes, a remarkably simple meal, and yet not so at the same time. The bread, while an excellent European style, still comes from a Panera franchise. The mozzarella was from a (organic, wisconsin-farmed) block from the super market (alas, it has still been too cold for the cheese people at the farmer's market to pull their own fresh motz). The tomatoes were indeed fresh and indeed local, purchased from our farmer's market (which means it was grown from within 50 miles), but have spent the last two weeks in a paper bag ripening up on our kitchen counter. The olive oil we had to travel to Italy to get.

And yet, the fact that we could do have such a meal on a still-cold-and-snowy March 1st in Minnesota, is itself a small miracle.

En Garde!

We went about some of our usual Saturday errands this morning. Hilary, mercifully, was relieved of going in to round on psych patients, so she got to come to the Farmer's Market for the first time in a long while. The selection this time of year is about what you'd expect for Minnesota in February. Still, we have a reliable supply of onion, potatoes, and apples. The cheese people had the cheddar that Hilary really likes, but we were stymied in getting some fresh mozzarella - it was too cold in the cheese house, apparently, to pull the mozz. The cheese house needs to get up to 75 to make the job of drawing up mozzarella balls palatable, and they couldn't make it happen this past week or two. Bummer. We did manage to get some unidentified greenhouse-grown greens, and a few tomatoes that will ripen up in a paper bag in, oh, about a week.

We still pine for outstanding European-style bread available through someone local. The Great Harvest has wonderful American bread - dense, wheaty stuff good for sandwiches and peanut butter. But for a typical crusty baguette (let alone Ciabatta) that you can put olive oil or hummus on, our best source around here is still Panera - the franchise. Bummer. But, at least we can have some fun with our food.

Tomatoes!

Alex returned from the winter farmers' market this morning with something even more exciting than the scones that I was pulling out of the oven: tomatoes!

We're not sure how the farmer managed to pull it off, but apparently this is his one winter harvest, so Alex got a good number of the tasty red treats, along with the first lettuce we've seen since October. So we had an incredible dinner: big fat slices of tomato topped with slices of local mozzarella cheese, drizzled with the olive oil we picked up at the neighboring farm in Italy. All of that on top of a nice baguette, and then some pepper and salt sprinkled on top. A little taste of summer in the midst of winter!

Our local food plans are turning out quite well. We've been using a lot of the frozen veggies that we stowed in the new chest freezer: butternut squash for pastas and a wild rice dish, red pepper for a bunch of recipes, leeks for potato-leek soup, zucchini and green beans and pesto for Steph's black bean soup, salsa verde for enchiladas, and berries on our Sunday waffles. Our un-frozen bags of garlic and shallots are holding up nicely, as are the potatoes. The onions aren't doing quite as well...some are sprouting despite being in the root cellar. We may not bring as many home in the fall next year, since plenty are available at the winter market and the farmers seem to be doing a better job of storing them than we are.

We do still buy some produce at the grocery store: the occasional spinach, celery, or fresh fruit like pears or bananas. We try hard to make sure it's at least from the US, rather than being shipped all the way from South America. In another eight to ten weeks, we should see the first local spring greens, like asparagus and maybe some early lettuce, from the farmers with heated greenhouses.

In the meantime, the miraculous tomatoes, and the balmy outside temperature of 26 degrees, give me hope that winter is not actually endless!

Brrr

"Brrr" is really all one can say about the weather today. But, since that makes for a pretty lousy blog post, here's a bit more:

It was twelve below when Hilary and I got up this morning. We bundled up in preparation for some Saturday morning errands: bread, farmer's market, library, returning some dress shoes, etc. My car wouldn't start. It had been used as recently as yesterday, but I guess the cold just sapped it of the will to live this morning (that, and I think it's still on its original battery, at 50,000+ miles). Thankfully, Hilary's car did start, which was a very good thing. Hers has a battery that's less than a year old, which was replaced when it had a string of life-less mornings last winter.

Now the errands are taken care of, and we are probably going to hang out (at home, inside) for the rest of the day and listen to the meter tick away the gas our furnace is using. Oh, and we'll take Jasper, who seems immune to the cold in his woolly shag, for a long walk later today.

Checking the weather outlook for the next few days, we probably won't break ten until the middle of the week. A real Minnesota winter, at last.

Coffee and La Campesina

The wireless network at La Finca Caribe and Blogger weren't wokring well together last night, so no pictures just yet. Soon enough Hilary will blog more fully.

After drying out for the 2-3days while in transit, and suffering the requisite caffeine withdrawal headaches, the first cup of coffee today hit me like coffee has not done for many years.

We shopped at three different places yesterday for provisions: a roadside produce stand, a supermercado, and the local health food store. The first was outstanding - it is great to reap the tropical bounty around us in pineapple, mango, avocado, and bananas. The supermercado was a little lacking in certain areas. For instance, Todd and Steph wanted to bake cookies for the group, but we were unable to find crystalized ginger (a long shot even stateside), nor molasses (wasn't there a time when they did nothing BUT?), nor chocolate chips. Interestiingly, there were plenty of packaged chocolate chip cookies from the Keebler elves. The health food store, bless 'em, was a small place that must be holding on by a thin margin.

As Hilary will tell later, we had an excellent dinner at La Campesina, a fairly new place that surely will be a great success - if they can get their telephone hooked up.



Sent from my iPhone

Pomegranate

This is what the seeds from six pomegranates look like. These are very curious fruits, with a very curious heritage. I highly recommend giving them a try. We use these in one of our favorite recipes. It is a bit of work pulling the seeds from the husk, though. Pomegranates are in season now, more or less, so we bought these to pull the seeds and freeze them, so that we can enjoy it into the next year.

We try to be very consciencious shoppers, especially when it comes to food. We like to think that our purchasing habits matter in the grand scheme of things. Hilary is vegetarian (with vegan tendencies), I'm more or less vegetarian by extension. We buy from the farmer's market as we can. We have cut up and frozen lots of food from that market for the winter, on the belief that the energy used to keep it frozen is less than the energy used to grow, process, package, and transport the store-bought produce it offsets. Purchasing local is better for the local farmers, too.

It doesn't work for everything, though. We still eat chocolate, I still drink coffee. We bring back large quantities of Vermont maple syrup each time we visit the alma mater. Pomegranates are a tricky case, too - they certainly don't grow around here. The ones we just purchased were from southern california. Like I said, we try to be consciencious shoppers, but it doesn't work for everything.

Weekend Activities

My, weren't we productive this past weekend! The weather was gorgeous - a definite encouragement to be out and about. Considering that the temperature is on its way down below 30 and the winds have been gusting up to 30 knots today, the weekend's nice weather, though chilly, may be the last for a bit.

We started off with the Farmer's Market. This was the first weekend of the Winter Market, which means that it was in a building at the fairgrounds. In contrast to last year's Winter Market (the first time it'd been held) this week was a wildly good time. There were folks at the door giving out coffee and pastries. A few vendors still had fresh produce (perhaps the last for a while, given that frosts are coming in more frequently now). We picked up a store of goods to lay in for the winter: broccoli (for the freezer), shallots and garlic (to hang in the cellar), leeks for some hearty soup. The market was bustling with activity. I hope that it remains popular - although it is difficult to think there'll be the same level of activity in February, when it's -15 and blowing.

One of my activities this weekend was putting together another set of bookshelves, as Hilary has been requesting for months now. They're not terribly exciting from the picture, I know, but still darn useful. It is a little tricky doing this kind of work with the tools I currently have, which are a far cry from the facilities that I got started with at Dartmouth. It helped a lot that I finally put together a cross-cutting jig for my tablesaw. The design is a replica of a set of shelves Hilary has had for years now - very quirky, too. The space for the bottom shelf is 10-1/4", for the middle it's 10-1/2", and the upper is 10-3/4". I like to think I could have done better, but opted for matching selves instead of better shelves.



I also raked the leaves. Ah the joys of home ownership. I truly love the large maple we have in the back yard. But, honestly, it drops so many leaves. How many? Examine the pictures below. The pile of bags is from two rakings we did in the last two weeks. Hopefully these'll be the last - the tree hasn't got anything left to throw at us. While outside raking, we like to let jasper out, and open the gate between our yard and the back-neighbors, so that he and the border collies can run around like crazy. A border collie is a marvel of nature - a perpetual energy source that seems to have no endurance limit. These two really don't get enough exercise, so they are naturally very rambunctious. While Jasper doesn't like to play fetch (he runs away from anything you throw at him) he does love to chase after the collies.




We also had one of Hilary's classmates over for dinner on Sunday. She cooked us some wonderful indian food, and we provided a chocolate-peanut-butter pie for dessert. In preparation for company, we did a blitz cleaning, including vacuuming the rug. Jasper, as you can well imagine, doesn't like the Roomba at all. He does like his waffles, though.

More of the Harvest, pt I

So, it's the weekend again. Weekends start with the Farmer's Market first thing Saturday morning. This week, as in the past few weeks, we've been picking up stuff to store away for the winter - peppers and butternut squash. Also, with some more ingredients, we make ourselves some lovely salsa. I had a request for the recipe we use. In truth, I haven't got one, really, it's more a conglomeration of fancies. But, for those interested:

5-7 ripe tomatoes
2-3 sweet peppers (I have been using red bell and poblano, but you could experiment with Jimmy Nardello, banana, etc.)
1-2 jalapeno peppers (or other, hotter varieties)
1 large onion
4-6 cloves garlic

Olive oil
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro (about 1 cup chopped)
1/2 to 1 tsp. salt, to taste
1/2 tsp ground pepper, to taste
1/2 to 1 tsp ground cumin
1 Tbsp brown sugar or molasses

Quarter the tomatoes, remove the stem, de-seed, and dice into a large bowl. Dice the sweet peppers and onion and place in a separate bowl. Halve the jalapenos, remove the seeds and white flesh (or keep it, if you like it hot), dice finely, and add to the sweet peppers. Mince the garlic and add to the “pepper” bowl.

Chop the cilantro down and add to the tomatoes. Stir in the salt, pepper, cumin, and sugar. Add 1/4 to 1/3 of the diced veggies to the tomatoes.

Heat a skillet over med-hi heat. Add enough olive oil for sautéing. Saute the peppers, onion, and garlic until they begin to soften. Add the sautéed veggies to the tomato mix. Done.

ps - all this chopping goes easily with a freshly sharpened kitchen knife. Thanks to our generous benefactors (you know who you are).

Mad Basil

What started off in May as two small packets from the Seed Savers Exchange, and gradually became seedlings in window boxes, have now created a veritable basil bush outside our porch. For a time in July and August, when the weather wasn't too screwy, I would go out on a Saturday and harvest a salad-spinner's worth of fresh basil leaves. Now that the plants have gone rampant, that's more than two spinners' worth (compare the before and after, at right). There really is only so much pesto one can deal with, even when storing ahead for winter.

That is only part of our lay-in for the coming winter. The farmer's market is in full harvest swing now, and we are starting to gather what we hope will be the bulk of our produce for the coming winter. We aren't quite so ambitious to try canning, so we are instead freezing a great portion of it. We figure that getting locally-produced food and storing it in an energy-efficient chest freezer is probably a darn sight better than February imports from Chile, New Zealand, or even California. Butternut squash, zucchini, and green beans are only the latest installment. We have also prepared and frozen salsas fresca and verde, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and red pepper. Potatoes, more squash, carrots, and parsnip are coming. Onions and garlic will hang in the cellar. We will hopefully have better results than last year's lay-in: we had many a whole squash slowly rot on the shelf in the cellar, while the potatoes softened and the onions sprouted.

UPDATE 9/23/07: How much pesto, you ask? I took stock of it yesterday - most of it is in the freezer. In various containers and bags we have 3-1/2 quarts frozen. Over the summer, we probably ate our way through 1-2 quarts. So, consider a half-gallon milk carton, then multiply that by three, then imagine them filled with pesto.