Fall Harvest

Yes, it's about time I put up my fall harvest post since it is...oh...DECEMBER! To be fair, because I am a stickler for such things, it is still autumn. Had I behaved as I normally do, I wouldn't have published this until December 21, thereby incriminating myself as a procrastinator. But I am on top of things this year or so I would like you to believe so below is proof that I am attempting to become more self-sufficient and to become less reliant on Stouffers for my family's nutritional needs.


In the past, I would readily plunk down $2+ for a box of peppermint tea. The new Randi scores live peppermint from her daughter's garden and makes her own tea! (Gardeners everywhere will tell you that peppermint is a wild child that will erupt spontaneously and take over your garden if you don't contain it. This is not true. In the five years that I have been planting peppermint, spearmint, and pineapple mint, I have yet to be able to keep a plant alive, hence the necessity to raid Em's garden where peppermint runs rampant.)

Canned potato soup? Pshaw! My friend and neighbor graciously unloaded a box of potatoes from her garden so I did what all domestic goddesses will do--I turned it into homemade potato soup! Technically, I guess you could still call it Campbell's potato soup since I spent 27 years of my life as a Campbell. (Did I mention that the reason my lovely neighbor shared her potatoes was because out of my 14 potato plants, my garden yielded roughly twenty golf ball sized potatoes? Yeah.)

So what do you do when you have twenty red Anaheim peppers that you are sure will spoil before you have the chance to eat them all? You dehydrate them, throw them in a blender, put them through a strainer, and call it cayenne! (The seeded residue after straining looks just like the contents of the hot pepper shaker at the pizza joint, so that's what we use it for.)

Progression of a frugalista:
1. Go out to eat for pizza. Realize eventually that it's too spendy so...
2. Start buying frozen pizza. Realize that it too is too spendy so...
3. Start making homemade pizza using pizza sauce from the grocery store. That becomes too spendy so...
4. Make homemade pizza using homemade pizza sauce with tomatoes from your own garden! (and from the gardens of all those people who call you and ask, "Could you use some tomatoes?" I've never yet turned down a tomato offer.) We have not yet attempted growing our own pepperoni so there are some things we still buy at the store.

One thing I have not managed to kill in my garden is our plum tree. I made these muffins recently from frozen plum puree from my 2011 harvest. Our plums trees didn't produce this year. (Oh wait...maybe I did kill them...) Anyway, the muffins were scrumptious.

In the olden days, my friends and I used to get together and spends lots of money at Applebee's. Now we get together and spend lots of time canning apples! It's so much more fun! *cough*

 

My wiseacre husband just walked by and said, "Wait a minute...are you...posting?"  

Yeah, well it just might happen more often now that harvesting and NaNoWriMo'ing are over. More on that NaNoWriMo business later...