CSA Confession

I just wasted an hour watching a new program on my favorite TV channel, TLC. I caught a few seconds of the next show while I was picking up my dinner dishes and grabbing the remote. The show - Hoarders: Buried Alive - kind of freaks me out. In the four minutes since I watched the intro and sat down at my computer, I have forgotten the exact wording of the lead-in, but it was something like "this isn't an apartment, it's a garbage dump." The words resonated with me. Even though I'm feeling under the weather and could easily veg out in front of a show that holds no interest (and a little bit of disgust) for me, I had to turn the tv off because I have bigger fish to fry tonight. Er . . . bigger vegetables to process. While my house could be tidier and my kitchen floor needs to be mopped, the phrase struck a chord because I feel like my fridge is turning into a garbage dump lately. And I don't particularly care for the feeling. So after I finish this quick blog, I'm off to do something with all of this produce.

This morning I took some moldy grapes out of the fridge from a farmers' market trip two (?) weeks ago, as well as a quarter of a tomato that I really don't think I'm going to eat - because there are still more than a half-dozen sitting on my counter getting old - there is a small bag of beets in the fridge, two tiny bags of radishes, and two large bags of green beans, plus assorted bags of greens that have been collecting for three weeks now, and a large bag of tomatillos that I really thought I'd use for salsa, but I never found the time to make it. There is celery that is one week old and wilting, which I desperately want to make chicken stock with, but my schedule is unpredictable right now and I am not sure when I am going to have the four-plus hours it will take to make it. I have three bags of potatoes, and several shallots that should be cooked as well. Don't forget the four pumpkins sitting on my kitchen counter - I can't decide if I should cook them and freeze the puree for pumpkin pie, or just let them sit here until I need pumpkin for something.

I went apple picking with a friend on Monday and brought home several pounds of windfalls that need to be made into applesauce and apple pie filling soon! (I was proud of myself on Monday night because my mom gave me some pork chops she had thawed out then realized she and my dad would not eat before going out of town on Tuesday - I served them with 12 baby red potatoes - microwaved for about 12 minutes - and apple slices (from 2 apples) sauteed in a little bit of butter with apple pie spice and maple syrup for seasoning.)

On top of the produce I already owned, I brought home another bag full of CSA produce today, including one sweet pepper, a baggie full of tiny hot peppers, a bag of peas which I actually can't wait to eat, three large turnips, a small bag of potatoes, two large bags of greens, some dill, and a few other things I can't remember right now.

At this point in the season, I am vegetabled out.

Some of these vegetables that are wasting away were free-to-me because they came from seeds/plants my dad bought for our garden. Others were very cheap. I bought my zucchini and pumpkin seeds, and am satisfied with the harvest, although one zucchini went to waste and a second one is on its way in that direction. I bought the grapes that went bad at the farmers' market - they seemed like such a good idea - and they were tasty, but my husband didn't like them and they made my mouth itchy, so they sat around for too long while we ate apples instead.

I enjoyed having the garden this year, and, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I have big plans in my head for tweaks for the garden next year. As long as someone loans me a yard, I will be happy to put in the work myself towards making a garden productive and useful.

But I don't think Michael and I will join a CSA again next year. This is a hard decision for me to make because I like our farmer a lot, I think he uses good farming practices, and at one time I had big plans for getting more out of our CSA for next year - in addition to the veggies we signed up for this year, the farm does egg shares and members have the option of "adopting" a chicken (or more likely a rooster) who will come home at some point as Sunday dinner. It is hard for me to think about telling Farmer John that we won't be coming back next year. I'll tell him the truth - it's not you, it's me.

Some of my friends have been impressed by my ability to go to the farmers' market and buy a bunch of seasonal produce, then bring it home and turn it into dinner. I don't go with a recipe in mind, I just buy what looks good and figure something out when I get home. But the thing I like about the farmers' market is that I don't have to buy things I won't use - like tomatillos and hot peppers. At our CSA I don't have the option not to bring home things I won't use. Okay, I guess I could just leave them at the farm for some other member, but I believe in giving most things a try. (I did use two or three hot peppers in the salsa I made while canning tomatoes.)

I have read (I don't remember where) that farmers' markets are actually the least profitable way for farmers to sell directly to the public. I suppose part of this is because there are costs associated with opening a stall and making sure someone is there to sell the vegetables. Also, there is no guarantee that food will sell at the market. A farmer may grow a bumper crop of zucchini and bring the most beautiful specimens to the market, only to discover that it won't sell - for whatever reason (no one in the whole city likes zucchini; other farmers have a superior product; other farmers have a cheaper product; all the home gardeners grew too much, etc.). Likewise, the farmer may lose business because she did not grow carrots and everyone wants to try the new carrot cake recipe they read about in Midwest Living.

The beauty of the CSA, from the farmers' perspective (and Farmer John mentioned this in our weekly newsletter recently), is that the buyers/shareholders/members take the risk about what the farm produces, right along with the farmer. I signed up for a CSA that gave me a list of fruits and veggies they might produce. I paid a flat fee in January for produce that would be delivered over the spring-summer-fall. There were no guarantees involved. The farm could have flooded in April and never recovered. The tomato blight my farmer was afraid of could have ruined the tomato crop - but it didn't. I know for a fact that our CSA's bell pepper crop did very poorly this year. To make up for this fact Farmer John planted more radishes and greens, to make sure he could fill our box each week - although there were certainly some weeks that our boxes were only half full in spite of his planting quick-growing crops to make up for the slower-developing crops that did not work out.

This risk does not always work out poorly for the CSA member. This year, our CSA's crop of zucchini also did poorly. This may actually have been a source for some rejoicing in my household, as we were sort of overwhelmed with zucchini from my own garden. And for the consumer who loves salad greens, our CSA has certainly had plenty of those this year!

I think you begin to see my point. At the farmers' market, while I don't always know what they are going to have, I never have to bring something home that I know I don't want to eat. At the CSA, sometimes I'm thrilled with my haul, sometimes I get sick of a particular type of vegetable, sometimes I don't have any idea what to do with something in my box (although my CSA does provide recipes) and sometimes I just plain don't like whatever it is I find when I lift the lid of the box. Whatever I get on Wednesday afternoons, the money has already passed on to Farmer John. He admits he has not made much (if any) of a profit off of the farm since he started a CSA two (or three?) years ago, but he hopes the venture will become more productive as more and more members join. He gets money up front to invest in hoop houses, seeds, and organic certification. We get the hope of tomatoes in August. For many, it works out to be a good deal. Sometimes it doesn't. That's the risk we took.

I know other bloggers who are members of CSAs have posted about bringing home veggies they just don't like. I suggested a red velvet cupcake recipe for someone struggling with beets. I actually like beets - the reason mine are sitting in the fridge is that they are not big enough (and I have too few) to serve as a side dish for two people, let alone the main course of a meal. It seems silly to do all the work of preparing beets only to have about 3/4 of a cup of beets to share between two people. I guess I've held onto them because I was waiting for more . . .

So sometimes I end up with produce I just don't eat before it goes bad. And then I have a really tough situation because my only realistic option for dealing with vegetable scraps and rotten veggies right now is putting them in the garbage. I have not figured out a way to make a worm composting system work in my current house, and my garbage disposal does not work. (I have read that garbage disposals are better for dealing with vegetable waste, so I am operating under that assumption.) Instead of composting or using the garbage disposal, I throw scraps in my trash can, in a plastic bag that will eventually be hauled to a landfill. While the scraps decompose in a landfill they will emit toxic gasses that are bad for the environment. I obviously don't feel good about this! One way to avoid sending these vegetables from the farm to the landfill, after an extended layover in my refrigerator, is to skip the CSA next year and stick with food I will gladly eat and can grow in the garden, supplemented with treats (like fruit and sweet corn) from the farmers' market.

I feel like I'm making excuses for myself. Maybe I am. But I don't think I'm really making a positive difference in the world by throwing away the better part of $18 worth of vegetables every week. (That is approximately what our CSA half-share costs per weeks, over 20 weeks.) Sometimes I think a whole share would be better - there would be more beets so I could make a whole dish out of them - but then I think of the potatoes that are still sitting on my counter, the tomatillos I couldn't find a use for, and the peppers I really don't want - and I realize that it would be unwise to experiment with a larger share next summer.

Not doing a CSA next year does not mean I will be less committed to eating local foods. But I'm feeling guilty because I understand the reasoning behind the CSA so well. The farmer gets a break by spreading the risk. The consumer has a box of fresh produce waiting once a week. I guess I'm not cut out to be that consumer right now, and it makes me feel like a little bit of a failure.

Maybe when I have a family full of mouths to feed I will feel differently, and will relish the adventure present in figuring out what to do with a bunch of random produce. I'm going to stick with that thought and try to relish the adventure of figuring out what to do with the produce currently in my house . . . wish me luck!

(Soon to come - a post about the apples I picked, and whatever becomes of them. It did not occur to me to take my camera to the apple orchard, but there will probably be pictures of the finished products.)

Too Many Veggies!

Between my bad habit of taking too much cash to the farmers' market, my garden, and my CSA membership, I have too many vegetables in my kitchen!

While I was able to turn large batches of peas, green beans, tomatoes, corn, zucchini, pumpkin, and apples into food for later in the year, I was blessed with four bags of red potatoes from my CSA, along with the warning, "These are not storage potatoes, so you should eat them up." Eat them with what?? I throw other vegetables into soups and freeze them for later. But potatoes don't freeze well. And I couldn't seem to get my act together to coordinate the thawing of some kind of meat with other veggies and the potatoes to make very many meals.

Maybe part of this is due to the fact that I now have two part-time jobs, neither of which has a set schedule, so I can't always count on a regular time to cook anymore. (Case in point: I had to work this past Thursday, which had been a day off for several weeks, thus, I did not cook anything or write multiple posts that day.)

Part of it might also be that, as much as I love fall and the romantic notion of "harvest" associated with my upcoming (but still two months away) favorite holiday, the joy of an overwhelming abundance of fresh produce has worn off. The potatoes have the misfortune of ripening after thrill of the harvest has worn out its welcome.

This morning, however, I was able to clear six bags of produce out of my kitchen! I used two brown bags of CSA potatoes, two bags of carrots (one from the CSA, one from my garden), a bag of yellow beans and a bag of green beans - both from the CSA. I also used two onions (one from the CSA, one from a farm stand) and leftover cloves of two types of garlic from the CSA and the Farmers' Market. This is my first all-local shepherd's pie. (And it's not really shepherd's pie because it is made with local, organic beef, not lamb. It is technically a cottage pie, but I grew up calling it shepherd's pie and I'm going to stick with that, in spite of the fact that this dish doesn't really resemble my mom's at all.)

I actually made two dishes - one large casserole dish for my house, and a smaller one for my parents. (My mom's shepherd's pie consists of one pound lean ground chuck, browned and drained, one can cream of mushroom soup, one-third of a soup can of water, one or two cans of green beans, and about 8 servings of Hungry Jack mashed potatoes. It was one of my favorite dishes growing up. The first time I cooked it for my husband I said, "I don't care if you like this or not. It's my favorite dish, and I'd appreciate it if you keep any negative comments to yourself." (For the record, he has never complained about my cooking. And this is now one of his favorite meals too.) In the past, I tried to cram too many vegetables into my large casserole dish for shepherd's pie, and, as happens too often in my kitchen, I had some overflow problems.

I used one pound of ground beef. I did not drain the beef because it is really, really low fat. I used what little drippings there were to cook my onions. You might choose to use more meat, but I spent many years as a vegetarian and I like the thought of meat as a condiment instead of a main dish. (To replace the canned cream of mushroom soup that would normally be mixed in with the beef, I could have made my own cream of mushroom soup from chicken stock, mushrooms, and cream. But there was no way I was going to buy MORE produce for this dish. The point was to get rid of all the veggies I hadn't been eating!)
I added fully cooked green and yellow beans. I'm not sure how many - but it was two weeks' worth from our CSA.
I also added fully cooked carrots. In the past, I made the mistake of adding lightly steamed veggies to the pie, thinking they would cook more as the dish baked. They didn't. And I did not appreciate crunchy parsnips and carrots in my comfort food.
I topped the dish with a layer of garlic mashed potatoes.
I put the casseroles in my fridge, and will cook one for dinner tomorrow night.

(I could have added corn and peas from my freezer, but I wanted to keep it simple. This dish had plenty of good stuff in it, and I might really want the corn in March.)

Then I went to my garden and dug up several more potatoes, a large bunch of carrots, and picked a huge zucchini and over a dozen tomatoes. I traded my dad the small shepherd's pie for a hunk of stuffed zucchini. I also picked three butternut squash, one of which I will use to make soup later in the fall. I left it at my parents' house for safekeeping.

I still have three bags of beets in the fridge (two from the CSA, one from the garden)(I like beets - but I have a mixture of golden beets and red ones and can't decide if I should cook them all together or separately), another bag of green beans, several small peppers, a bag of tomatillos, a bag of mixed lettuce, two baggies of radishes, and a bunch of cilantro.

I will be making salsa soon. And beets.

Ginger Ale Update

We love the ginger ale!

Because there are only two people in my family, and we really don't drink that much soda, I didn't want to mix up a whole liter of this stuff at once. Instead, I bought a six-pack of 20 oz bottles of seltzer water, and we've been splitting one bottle at a time. I have not used all the syrup yet, and we have gone through 3 bottles of water, so I think I am making a more diluted soda than the original. (It called for one liter of soda per 1.5 cups sugar, 1 cup ginger, 1 cup water.)

Yum.

Agribusiness and Advertising

Today I read a disturbing article in my hometown newspaper. It was written by an Associated Press writer, so maybe you read it too, in your neck of the woods. It was about corn refiners and their desire to get away from the negative connotations of the ingredient they make called "high fructose corn syrup." They want to change the name officially - and have already been using a new name. "Corn Sugar." I think you can read the article here. In case my link doesn't work (I don't know how long news stories stay in this database) here are some highlights:

The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten its image with a new name: corn sugar.

The Corn Refiners Association applied Tuesday to the federal government for permission to use the name on food labels. The group hopes a new name will ease confusion about the sweetener, which is used in soft drinks, bread, cereal and other products.

Where is Shakespeare when you need him? I realize that the Corn Refiners Association is facing serious pressure from people like me and her and her and him and these guys (check the blog on Fridays to see the Food Product of the Week)- not to mention him and her, who (for some of us) brought these issues to our attention in the first place. The ('poor' but actually quite well-subsidized) Corn Refiners are stuck between a rock candy and a hard candy. They make a refined food product grown in monocultures sustained only by the dumping of chemical fertilizers into the ground, and we don't want to buy it anymore. Literally. But a corn-based sweetener by any other name is going to . . . well, taste the same. Yet they think Americans are dumb enough to buy this name change. Figuratively, this time. Well, literally too.

But to say that they are changing the name of this food-like substance in order to "ease confusion" is ridiculous. I suppose I should be careful what I say about this, as I'm liable to get caught in some veggie libel laws over my disgust with (both my own craving for and the industry's production of) corn byproducts. (Why don't they call it a corn byproduct? Wouldn't that make it pretty straightforward for consumers?)

There are two things going on here. First, the corn industry wants to get away from HFCS because by now most Americans have heard that HFCS is bad. Of course, the issue for a few of us is not whether HFCS is more bad for us than regular sugar. The issue is that people buy bread and pasta and potato chips and all kinds of foods that they would not expect to find sugar in, and see HFCS listed as one of (the first!) ingredients. For many years, HFCS could hide behind its mysterious (but mostly pronounce-able) name. No one understood what High Fructose Corn Syrup was. It sounded like a vegetable. It was not clear that HFCS was just a cheap alternative to sugar, and a highly government-subsidized one at that. So most of us know what HFCS means. And some people are starting to react.

Parents such as Joan Leib scan ingredient labels and will not buy anything with it. The mother of two in Somerville, Mass., has been avoiding the sweetener for about a year to reduce sweeteners in her family's diet. "I found it in things that you would never think needed it, or should have it," said Leib, 36. "I found it in jars of pickles, in English muffins and bread. Why do we need extra sweeteners?" Many companies are responding by removing it from their products. Last month, Sara Lee switched to sugar in two of its breads. Gatorade, Snapple and Hunt's Ketchup very publicly switched to sugar in the past two years.

The companies that are are replacing HFCS with sugar are not doing anyone any favors! (Okay, sugar cane farmers are probably happy.) They should be working to reduce the overall sugar content of the foods rather than substituting one type of sugar for another. (For what it is worth, we know that growing miles and miles of corn in monoculture is bad for the environment, but let's get real, people. Cane sugar is grown the same way. And sugar growers in the US are subsidized too, albeit differently from the corn growers.) We need to get away from our dependence on cheap sugar.

My last post is a perfect example of how processed corn has made Americans change our diets over the last century because of a steady supply of cheap fructose. Have you noticed how much honey and maple syrup cost?? When I finally get to a point where I am using only local sweeteners, I am going to have to get used to eating a LOT fewer sweets. I paid $14 for a quart of Maple Syrup from my CSA, and this was a bargain - in the same area my dad paid $19 at a Farmers' Market for a quart of syrup. And maple syrup is not quite as sweet as table sugar, so you need to use more of it to achieve the desired sweetness. (I haven't looked into maple sugar, but I probably will at some point in the future.) Honey is not cheap either, although you can actually substitute 2/3 cup of honey for 1 cup of sugar. I think I paid about $20 for 80 ounces (10 cups) of local honey at our grocery store. Organic and gourmet honeys cost more.

But I have digressed. The other thing that the Corn Refiners are doing is that they are taking advantage of people like me and the bloggers/writers I mentioned above. (Except for the fact that the people they're actually going to reach are less perceptive - or more busy - or less interested in food - than me.) They are preying on the innocent, slightly health-conscious, public. They are going to call their product "corn sugar" and consumers are going to eat it up. Literally. And also figuratively. If all they needed was to get away from the negative associations with HFCS, they could pick a different name. I suggested "corn byproduct" or they could even go with "very sweet corn byproduct" but obviously they're not going to do that. They picked the innocent sounding "corn sugar." "Corn sugar" is like the "real food" campaigns being touted by fast food restaurants. Corn and Sugar are normal words that fourth-graders can pronounce. They are words that your great-grandmother would recognize. Of course, she would recognize them as two different things entirely, but she would have a mental image of "corn" and "sugar." She would have them in her kitchen. So "corn sugar" must be a good thing, right? There is nothing we can do to keep fast food chains and agribusiness stop taking advantage of consumer ignorance, except to keep ourselves educated and try to stay one step ahead of them.

The fast food industry, and now the Corn Refiners, are onto us. So we have to get smarter. We need to move beyond the Food Rules (some of which I referenced above and would/should cite, but my book is at my mother-in-law's house) and think even more deeply and carefully about our food choices.

Since I certainly don't want to eat any more sugar right now, perhaps I'll just eat my words. The attitude we have to have (and that I will try harder to have at all times going forward) is that, just because your ginger root came from Thailand and there is no way to justify your home brew as local, it is still important not to cave in to not corporate interests. Each time we choose an item - whether it is a 15 oz can of pumpkin (I've been reading a lot of those recipes lately) or a basil leaf or a ginger root - we have a choice. We can know with 100% certainty where it came from (my backyard, my CSA, my farmer's market) or we can trust corporate America to make that choice for us. I recognize that not every person can buy locally for every meal, or even for one meal a day. (My sister continually points out that there are people who live in New York City and Chicago who don't have yards. I know this. I do. I am a renter. My garden is an hour away from my back yard.) But it is up to us to take the first step. For me, that step was not buying bread at the store. I didn't think HFCS belonged in my 100% whole wheat bread. So I don't put it in the bread I make. Calling it corn sugar is not going to change my mind. I hope you won't let it change yours.

For more puffery and pseudo-science:
Check out the Corn Refiners Association:
This is a list of all the great things corn syrup does for foods that are not sweet - like spaghetti sauce. Apparently it is a preservative. (Score for the Food Rules. Bugs don't want to eat HFCS. Neither should you.)

If it wasn't obvious, I'm not receiving any money from Wendy's for linking you to their ads. Remember folks, Fast Food can't fake fresh.

Here is an interview with the head chef of McDonalds (from their website). He talks about simplicity, and recalls the best apple he ever ate - plucked right out of a tree in an apple orchard. Then he discusses how his goal is to make the freshest food available to his customers. (Anywhere in the world, in any climate, any season, any time of day. Or night.) As a teaser, here is his answer to the question "What is your long-term goal for the McDonalds menu?" he replied, "To stay relevant. And to change people's perceptions about our food not being real. I want people to know that there are a lot of dedicated, passionate professional people out there who think about that menu every single day."

For the other side of the story, be sure to check out Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Note: I apologize for formatting problems. I spent several hours putting this post together, and discovered that while Blogger let me type from 7:48 p.m. until 11:26 p.m. it was stuck "saving" the post at 7:48 and I would have lost the whole thing if I hadn't copied the post into a Word document. Most of the formatting was preserved, but the quotation marks I put around the italicized portions taken from the newspaper article, the McDonalds quote, and the Corn Refiners page looked goofy so I tried to take them out. If it is in italics, it is either a quotation or the name of a book. I trust that you can figure out which.

Beverage of Choice

In college, my roommate and I bought Mountain Dew by the case - and we could easily go through two cases in a week. (Her mother subsidized this addiction.) We built a shrine out of Mountain Dew cans to a quarterback (who shall remain nameless) whose face happened to be plastered on the cans because he was headed to the Superbowl, and at the time his uniform was a good match for Mountain Dew's logo.

I have not kept pop in my house since after I took the Bar Exam, except for maybe a random purchase here and there, but I have a weakness for ordering pop at restaurants. (Except last summer when I was making an effort to drink 9 glasses of water ever day, and I didn't have any room left over for soda!) In addition to drinking a lot of water last summer, I started reading about local foods and real foods, and obviously, soda didn't make it on my shopping list. But lately, in spite of my continuing interest in local, real foods, I have been craving soda. Especially Mountain Dew. My boss is not a coffee person, but her love of Mountain Dew seems to be contagious.
I'd like to say that this is just a prop, or an old photo from college, but it isn't. After looking at every liquid substance in my house this evening, and discovering (not at all to my surprise) that none of them were Mountain Dew, I headed to the grocery store with a short list - I wanted a 20 ounce bottle of soda for right now, and the ingredients to make homemade ginger ale tonight.

I read this post on Table of Promise and was excited to see a very simple home-made replacement for soda. (COB is more hard-core than me when it comes to high-fructose corn syrup.) I checked out the original recipe, and headed to the store for ginger and seltzer water. (I've never bought raw ginger root before.)

I used a cup and a half of turbinado sugar instead of honey like COB or (presumably) pure cane sugar like the original.
I did this for two reasons. First, turbinado sugar is less processed than white sugar. As the packaging from the sugar I bought today explains, "Turbinado Sugar is the natural alternative to white sugar. It is harvested from 100% sugar cane. But unlike white sugar . . . Turbinado Sugar is what remains after raw sugar is washed. Once the impurities in raw sugar have been washed away, turbinado sugar remains, with a natural coating of sweet golden molasses." (And I always believe everything corporate food processors tell me. Stay tuned for more on this topic . . .) Second, I have always wanted to buy a bag of this sugar, but 24 ounces sell for $5, and I've never had such a good excuse to spend money on this unnecessary item before. (Also, while I could have used local honey like COB, the fact that my ginger came from Thailand sort of makes the origin of the sweetener a moot point. And since I don't even know if I'm going to like the finished product, I didn't want to waste perfectly wonderful honey.)

I mixed the sugar with a cup of water, and a little over a cup of raw, peeled, chopped ginger.
I brought it to a boil, and now it is steeping. I will leave it in the fridge overnight.
I will post pictures of the finished product when we drink it.

On Seasonality

Notes:
I think this is my first home-grown cake.

Did you notice that I made a very special effort not to use my handy-dandy, all-purpose snowman platter for this one?

Sorry my camera never travels with me to the garden; I don't have a picture of the pumpkins in on the vine.

Finished Apple Butter!

Because some of you wanted to see . . .

Apple Butter first thing in the morning, after cooking on low all night:
Another shot:

Apple Butter after cooking with the lid off (on low, not high as the recipe called for, because I decided to go back to bed instead of sitting up with the crock pot) for an hour:
Another shot:
All packed up and ready to go in the freezer:
The green-lidded containers hold 2 cups each. I think the blue-lidded container also holds about 2 cups, and the square container holds a cup and a quarter. The little one is in the fridge, the others are waiting for spring.

By the way, in a coffee shop last week, where I stopped after dropping my car off at the mechanic's to have the dragging piece of metal looked at, I enjoyed a cup of pumpkin spice coffee. This prompted the cashier to tell me that their order of pumpkin had arrived, and the first batch of pumpkin muffins would be available the next day. She apparently told other customers about the impending pumpkin-filled carbohydrate goodness, because I heard a lady ask the cashier, "Apple pie and pumpkin pie are so good. Why do we only make them in the fall?"

The cashier said she had no idea why we eat apples and pumpkins in the fall. Then the lady confessed she'd made an apple pie at the start of summer. You know, because you can get apples any time. It's not as if apples are seasonal like watermelon or anything.

I really wanted to enlighten them, but I figured that would be rude, so I just grimaced to myself, and thought at them as hard as I could, "Pumpkins and apples are fall crops. That's why we eat them in the fall!" And I enjoyed my coffee.

Apple Butter

I've been eager to make apple butter since I bought a few ginger gold apples at the farmers' market a few weeks ago (when I was looking for a cantaloupe and came home with 20 lbs of tomatoes, a dozen ears of corn, a watermelon, etc.) and when I heard a news story on the radio last week saying that apples are early this year, so now is the time to buy - before they're gone - I figured I better get my act together.

My recipe for apple butter requires 13 hours of cooking in a crock pot, which means I need to do some planning. Last year I portioned out the finished apple butter in the morning before heading off to my student teaching assignment. I think I had to get up at 4 to make that work. Tomorrow I'll have to be up by about 6 to make sure my apple butter doesn't burn. I think I can handle it.

I tried to recruit help for making apple butter, but my little sister is visiting our other sister, and I couldn't get ahold of my friend of 25 years who graciously offered to lend a hand. While it pays off in the end, apple butter is a lot of work up front. Especially when you've already been chopping and peeling all day.

Start with five and half pounds of apples:
Core, peel, and dice them:
Watch your hands get pruny from the juice and wonder how there can still be so many apples left:
Look at the pile of apples still waiting to be chopped, and wonder if you are going to need another garbage bowl:
Watch the apples pile up in the bottom of the crock pot, but wonder if you're chopping them small enough:
Continue to core, peel, and chop:
Forget about your garbage bowl - are these apples going to fit in the crock pot?
Finally . . . over an hour later . . . the end is in sight:


Add four cups of sugar, two teaspoons of cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of cloves and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Stir carefully. Cook on high for an hour, then turn the heat down to low and simmer 9 - 11 hours - stirring occasionally, and then frequently towards the end. Enjoy the yummy fall scent of cinnamon and apple.
Cook for one additional hour on high heat with the lid off. Portion into sterile containers. Cool and refrigerate some, and freeze the rest. (The Ball Blue Book has a recipe for apple butter that can be canned . . . I have enough apples left to make it, but I don't have enough of the right size of jars at the moment.)

Stop buying flavored yogurt that is full of artificial colors and flavors, high fructose corn syrup, and other chemical additives, and add a couple of heaping spoonfuls of apple butter to plain (organic, if your store carries it - mine doesn't) yogurt instead.

My next batch will probably incorporate maple syrup or honey instead of some or all of the sugar (unless I use the Ball recipe and can it instead of freezing it . . . you know how I feel about messing with canning recipes).