The Last Chard

As winter looms, there are chores to check off the list: hay, firewood, garden produce. The other day my brother was helping me harvest beets. “These are carrot-shaped”, he said, shovel in hand. “That’s because you’re digging up the swiss chard”, I replied. I managed to salvage enough chard for a meal. I made a dish from Recipes For a Small Planet. I cooked onions from the garden, no garlic because I don’t care for it, a bit of olive oil, the chard with the leaves and stalks chopped separately, a can of red kidney beans, cooked rice, soy sauce. Add some sharp cheddar. It’s a colorful dish for a colorful fall day. The chard I raised this year was the Bright Lights variety, a red, yellow and purple mix.

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Harvest or Not

The ground in the orchard is carpeted in apples. My neighbor gave me another giant cabbage, and I have a gallon crock in the kitchen for making sauerkraut, which I have never done before. I’ve already frozen tomatoes and made salsa but it’s ready to be done again. Beets, green onions, fennel, and shell beans are still in the garden. What’s more, the big bag of ripe bananas from Teals are now overripe. The killing frost that destroyed the swiss chard (which is very hard to kill) might be termed a blessing. No, wait. In the warm weather it has started growing again……

Poet and Peasant

The apple crop is good this year.  But there is always the dilemma of what to do with all the apples.  I tried giving them away.  People would take maybe five or ten pounds.  I had better luck selling them.  If I charged, people thought they were better than if I was giving them away.  But selling apples required me to pick them.  And bending overrr or reaching up thousands of times gets old fast.  Last year we made pureed apple sauce.  It is all gone.  In a Girls Scout handbook from the ancient past, I saw a recipe called poet and peasant.  It’s quite simple.  Apples and onions are fried together.  It sounds weird.  But I’m willing to try it.