Autumn Harvest

The unseasonably wet spring meant delayed and diminished crops. My squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers suffered.

My reliable vegetables were the French fingerling potatoes and sunchokes. I also planted some warba potatoes, which P got from a friend who’s a commercial farmer. Those were especially creamy in texture. I used the potatoes in chowders.

Served with tomato bread (pan con tomate) to use up the cherry tomatoes, which typically grow like gangbusters but were lacklustre this year. I really need to fortify the veg garden with sea soil to get the magical crops of yesteryear.

Also tried Serious Eats’ roast potatoes, which were crisp on the outside but a tad dry inside. Next time, I’d bake them for say 30 rather than 50 minutes.

Experimented with this AllRecipes‘ hash brown recipe, which turned out nice in terms of cohesion and browning but lost crispiness. The upper one coated lightly in panko fared better.

One new crop was 8-ball squash, which is like a zucchini but round. I grew it to the size of a grapefruit, to get the seed beds, which absorb sauces like sponges.

I stir fried this squash using my favourite recipe. The skin on 8-balls are slightly tougher if grown longer. Fibre. Good!

Finally, cherries, one of my favourite summer-time fruits. I don’t grow them but wish I could, given the prices charged by stores these days. I used my cute little new Dash pie maker to try making cherry pie.

The cherry filling recipe from the Dash Guide turned out very sweet, using 1/2 cup sugar with 2 cups cherries. The pie crust, from Simply Recipes, was not memorable.

I much prefer my cherries raw, and enjoyed them on spumoni, alongside some chopped pistachios.

Grateful for the harvest but hoping next year’s growing season is longer and more bountiful.