Fall is here in Vermont

Fall is here. It's a hard time for me because I love fall, it's my favorite season by far, but I don't love winter. I like it enough but I wish fall was longer and winter was shorter. Here are my musings for the day.

Our CSA this summer got hit by late blight. We received nary a tomato. The wet weather also made it a low harvest season. But I feel I still got my money's worth. I was saddened when they sent out an email telling us how hard each crop was hit by the blight or the weather. And one member told the farmers they were upset they joined this CSA again this year. How dare she. That's part of the fun, the adventure, the risk. Welcome to reality.

Our garden was an interesting experiment. The community garden we're in also got hit by late blight. I did manage to get a few tomatoes from the pots at our house. The things that did really well were mustard greens, ground cherries, beets, green beans. We grew head lettuce for the first time. We were too busy to preserve much this summer. We got things in too late and we end loaded our summer with out of town activities to do any meaningful putting up projects. Hopefully next summer we can do more.

Dan made me sad the other day when he said he didn't want to do the winter CSA. He said he's sick of having to eat what we have. I guess we've been in a CSA for over a year now. I can see how he feels that way. He wants to make things that involve other produce we're not getting from the CSA and it's hard for me to justify buying more produce when we can barely eat what's in the crisper now. I guess I have to indulge him occasionally so he'll indulge my love of eating locally.

Today's rainy and blah. I'm trying a new bread project today. I've already made the basic recipe from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. IT was fine, but I really want a whole-wheat bread recipe. I found Alexandra's Kitchen blog yesterday, who wrote about successfully making the recipe with half whole-wheat flour. So, that's working right now.

I also have a pot of beans simmering away on the stove and a chicken defrosting. I plan to roast the chicken later so we can make pho this week (one of the dishes Dan's been craving). Then the beans will go into a Mexican-inspired stew. I defrosted some salsa still lingering in my freezer from last summer that tastes more like chili base than salsa. I think I'll put potatoes and mustard greens in the stew and some chicken sausage along with the beans.