August 7, 2007

The Bounties of Fall?

What OLS week is it? 5? 6? Okay, so I have not been real dedicated to finding local produce these past few weeks...oops! The good news is that the Hubby and I will still be enjoying our local bounty this fall and winter.

We are hoping to try out (from left to right) the oven-dried and home grown tomatoes in an herb bread, the corn from M's parents as corn relish on who knows what, and some homemade spaghetti sauce again from our very own tomatoes (which I happen to know is good, because last night we ate the last bit of sauce which would only partially fill a jar after canning it.)


We are also the Best Blackberry Scavengers Ever in all the world and after gathering hundreds of blackberries for this year's jelly, we also managed to acquire enough (about another 4 quarts) for M to make a wild blackberry wheat ale. The house is a little hoppy-smelling right now from all the open cooking of the ingredients on the stove, but it should thin out as the beer ferments in a closed container. Next year, I think I should demand a Wild Blackberry Wine for myself. Oh, and maybe a blackberry cobbler too. And that we should possibly plant our own bushes, because we are blackberry-aholics!!! Jellies, beers, wines, cobblers....anything else we need to try?


As a side note to all of those who are home brewers and pet owners; Your dog will eat the hops you filtered out and set aside to throw on the compost pile. Nothing goes to waste in this house, not even the compostables. (I will warn you though, I have no idea how this is going to affect PoPo's system. We are horrible pet owner's and we experiment to see if there is anything she won't eat out of our hands. No, you're not supposed to give your dog table scraps it upsets their delicate digestive system, blah, blah, blah...The vet says PoPo is in outstanding health, minus the pollen allergies. So we play this little game to amuse ourselves and I don't see PoPo complaining.)

Stay Tuned: I am trying to grow some pumpkin seedling from my Grandmother's heirloom milk pumpkin seeds!

2 comments:

Faith said...

So you've got a good tomato sauce recipe? Care to share? I'm going to try to make my own tomato sauce and I found a couple of recipes, but if you've got one that's tried and true I'd sure like to give it a shot.

And I'll be over later for some blackberry beer and/or wine.

Liz said...

You should definitely give Blackberry wine a try... James made some last year and it's delicious!

The other thing we like to do is infuse blackberries in either brandy or vodka for cordials. Yum!