Saturday, October 3, 2009

A Bountiful Summer

Summer is over and fall is here, but I'm still trying to hold on to the lingering days. I stocked up on everbearing strawberries at our last Farmer's Market of the year. I didn't even know there was a such thing as "everbearing" strawberries, but they are yummy. Most of these went into the freezer along with my raspberries and blueberries from earlier in the summer. These, plus the peaches and pears that a friend brought over from Yakima, should keep me in fruity smoothies for months. Yeah!

My parent's garden still had lots of tomatoes so they went into a tasty tomato dill soup. All these fresh foods may make me into a cook yet - of course, there was the incident with the blender, but maybe I've learned my lesson this time. I didn't know mixing hot foods in a blender was so different than cold foods. My advice to anyone else trying this is: don't overfill the blender and make sure you hold the lid tight. Just cooked pureed tomatoes can really burn the skin. I'll let your imagination fill in the rest of the details!
With the end of summer it was finally time to pick the pumpkins that my kids have been ogling in their grandparents' garden for months.. The kids decided long ago which pumpkin belonged to which child, but they do grow unpredictably, so the youngest child ended up with the biggest pumpkin. Here is Sydney in the garden back when the pumpkins were still green.

The next picture shows Stephen pointing to her pumpkin (which eventually made it to our house since Sydney wasn't close enough to claim it for herself). All in all, we had a fun time, picking and weighing the pumpkins. The biggest came in at 24 pounds! All in all it's been a great summer! Now, it's on to Fall.

2 comments:

  1. Interestingly, I think Sydney's pumpkin weighed 21.5 lbs which was exactly her current weight. Thanks to Stephen for taking care of her pumpkin. Another pumkin anecdote is that here in Clyde Hill, the people living across from the police station had a pumkin carving party and then displayed some 50 or so carved pumpkins all lit up for the week or so before Halloween. AMLD

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  2. Maybe you should donate your extras to them? Or the elephants at the Woodland Park Zoo for their annual pumpkin bash?

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