Week 18: Season's Endings

It's been a corny summer. Good thing we're a corny family.

October 9 was our last pickup of the season: corn, apples, carrots, eggplant, parsnips, and peppers. I'm going to have to buy my Swiss chard at the supermarket or greengrocer now.

Way back in June, it wasn't clear we'd see anything this summer but lettuce, radishes, and leafy green vegetables. But here are some totals from the season:

• 116 ears of corn
• 51 peppers, about evenly split between sweet bell peppers and hot varieties
• 44 tomatoes (that was a surprise!)
• 28 apples
• 27 cucumbers
• 18 eggplant
• 18 heads of lettuce (14 of them in the first three weeks of the season)
• 11 summer squash and zucchini, combined
• 2 winter squash
• and ... 4 bunches of Swiss chard.

I have around 12 cups of blanched corn kernels in my freezer, so we won't be needing any canned corn for a while.

It was nice enough last Sunday to grill the fresh corn and eat it outside -- probably our last picnic until spring. I saved the kernels from two of the grilled ears for a pot of vegetarian chili.

The eggplant and some of the peppers went into a stir fry, my go-to plan for when I need a quick dinner. (Recipe posted here.)

The rest of the week has been dominated by apples. Caboodle and The Programmer picked a half-peck together a couple of weeks ago. Add to that the apples coming steadily from the CSA (six in this final week), and the full peck that Caboodle picked during a youth group outing on Columbus Day. I've resorted to making applesauce -- the first recipe I learned in junior high Home Ec.! I guess that course was worthwhile after all.