Last of the Zucchini, Take Two

On Wednesday, before I picked up the last CSA of the season, I went to my parents' house. I went there for two reasons. First, I wanted to see my dad who had knee surgery last week, but is now up and walking around on crutches. Second, I wanted to do some gardening.

I left the remaining carrots in the ground, since they keep well there, and knew I was getting some from the CSA. I picked a lot of zucchini, though. And two potatoes, two butternut squash, and a pumpkin. And I brought some questionable onions home with me.

I'm not kidding about the zucchini. I picked a Lot. NINE.
The dog ate part of one, because the flower end was starting to rot.

Okay, so they weren't particularly large zucchini, like some of the ones I harvested this summer. In fact, they were downright puny:
but they're still zucchini (and that is a votive candle).

I made the rest for dinner tonight, along with an eggplant I picked up at my local Thursday Farmers' Market,
two CSA onions and one questionable onion from my garden, (The onions my dad and I grew are all spotty and slightly soft.)
a quart of homemade tomato puree from Thursday Market tomatoes,
and some garlic powder, because I don't have any real garlic at the moment.
Okay, okay, I also threw in the 16 ounce package of button mushrooms from California that I bought at the grocery store last week.
I mixed this veggie goodness with a package of curly pasta that my husband requested from the grocery store. Voila. Dinner for two, and a whole lot of leftovers.

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).

One More Day of Summer

I stopped by the Farmers Market today to look at apples, after picking my car up from the shop where I had dropped it off earlier in the day so that they could reattach the braces that hold my gas tank onto my car. (I noticed that some kind of metal piece was hanging off of my car after I picked up our CSA share yesterday, which meant I did not stop at a local orchard to buy apples. The part will be in next week and my car will be as good as . . . a 20 year old car can be.) Everything worked out, because there were good apples at the farmers' market (although they were more expensive this week than two weeks ago) and I happened upon some grapes and other sweet buys.

I already blogged about making pesto this summer, but I couldn't resist this deal at the Price Farm, where I got all of those tomatoes and these tomatoes earlier in the summer.
So I made another batch of pesto tonight, then scrambled to find containers to freeze it in.
With the pumpkin and apple butters bubbling away in the kitchen, pesto seemed kind of out of place and out of season, but it is still summer, after all.

New Squash Season

While I picked plenty of zucchini in the garden yesterday, some other squash varieties were clamoring for attention.
Bright orange ones!

The butternut squash are not quite ready yet, but the pumpkin vines have been crumbling off of the pumpkins for a few days, so it seemed to be time to harvest the pumpkins.

My dad took a couple to Indiana for the grandkids, and I brought 7 home to turn into puree.
I chopped and shredded the zucchini while four of my pumpkins were roasting in the oven.

After I roasted them, I turned them into puree, and saved the seeds for a crispy snack.

I learned last fall that the easiest way to cook a pumpkin is to put the whole thing in a 350 degree oven (in a pan) with a few slits in the top to let the steam out. It doesn't work if you need chunks of pumpkin, but if you need puree for soup, bread, cookies, pie, etc., you can't beat this method.
I fit four pumpkins in the oven at once and cooked them for a little over an hour.
It's amazing how much easier a pumpkin is to carve after it is cooked!
The flesh comes right off of the skin with a small spoon and gentle pressure.
I used a hand blender to turn the stringy chunks into puree:
and then I got to work on the seeds.


I seasoned them with garlic powder, onion powder, seasoned salt, and pepper, then roasted the seeds at 350 until they popped. I was chopping apples and not paying attention to time, but my recipe, from Elspeth's blog, said that they would pop - and they did.In the meantime, I had picked up a bushel of apples at the farmers' market, and was working on a batch of apple butter. Since I was already looking for containers and measuring out large amounts of sugar and fall seasonings, I decided to make some pumpkin butter with my pumpkin puree.
Four cups of puree, plus four cups (!) of brown sugar, 5/8 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp each of nutmeg, allspice, and ground cloves, and a couple of squirts of RealLemon juice. (The recipe called for the juice of two lemons, but I used the lemon juice I have on hand for canning.) I wanted to use some of my beautiful maple syrup, or at least some honey as sweetener, instead of all of the sugar, but I've never even eaten pumpkin butter before, and decided not to mess with the recipe until I knew what I was getting myself into. (I made half a batch, which made about 6 cups after simmering on low for an hour - while I made pesto.)

I'm not sure whether I like pumpkin butter or not. We don't have any bread in the house to eat with the pumpkin butter . . . because I'm having a little difficulty with the bread machine I'm borrowing from my parents. (I can't get it apart to wash it. I tried soaking it overnight. Twice.)
But it was a productive day, and I still have three whole pumpkins and about 4 cups of puree in the fridge. And since Jenna posted this recipe, I have an idea of what to do with it!