Cinderella's Curried Butter Balls

Now that I am a fancy breeder, I understand why the cat lovers call their kitties these long names with detailed clues to their parentage.
This year's pumpkin harvest was amazing, and it is still continuing. This year I tried another experiment. Last year, I planted Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkin (my favorite for how cool it looks), and also the standard Butternut squash varieties (my favorite for eating). Both varieties are in the group cucurbita maxima, so I had kind of an idea (and a hope) that they would cross.
I was interested in a smaller pumpkin than the fancy French kind that I now usually just call "Cinderella". Every time I wanted to boot one up, I had to find even more room in the fridge or find 20 friends to share it with. This year I even resorted to removing the produce bins to get some of a leftover pumpkin into cold storage. So, to this aim, I planted the saved seeds, and put the plants very close together, and hoped that the larger Cinderella had crossed with the smaller Buttercup and I'd end up with a smaller really cool red pumpkin that is still super tasty.
Well, so far, I am declaring success, even though I haven't actually tasted all of the varieties I came up with. Both potential parents are legends in the taste department, so I had no worries there. I probably ended up with about 10 plants and around 16 giant pumpkins. I got several shapes: the traditional Cinderella squat shape, a higher and boxier shape more like the butternut, and a round kind. All are the same bright orange-red color as Cinderella. Now the round ones are interesting. They have more of a green tinge at the bottom, and being almost perfectly round, have to rest on their sides. Though they were some of the first to fruit, they took more than a month longer to ripen than the others. And though the largest round specimen is only 8 inches wide, it weighs in at a hefty 12 pounds.
I am notoriously bad at keeping track of my seeds. Now to keep track of the 3 new varieties? This year I also planted some buttercup, but it didn't do too well, so I don't expect much additional crossing. In 2012, I'll probably plant last year's seed again, so I can get some additional selections.
Oh, and the curried? It's not about the color. I almost forgot. I also planted one Red Kuri pumpkin last year. It's also a maxima. Come to think of it, my round pumpkins look pretty close to them, only without the neck and all the fussiness.
Note: I got the above photo from Seeds of Change, where I also got the original seeds.

Fractal Brussel Sprouts

Yes, we have all heard of fractal cauliflower, but fractal brussel sprouts????

I don't really go over to the brussel sprout plant very much anymore. It is over two years old, and is basically a snail condo right now, and overshadowed by a grove of sunchoke plants. But with the cooler weather, I decided to take a look and see how things were going

I found lots of sprouts, but upon picking them, I noticed that at the base of each sprout, there were a few new, baby sprouts. They were around a millimeter or two wide. Very cute!

I think if I had a magnifying glass, I would find that at the base of these sproutlets, there would be even more and more, tiny and tinier sprouts. Sprouts all the way down.

Salad competition - Locavore potluck redo

Kris posted his salad, but now we need a salad-off. Since I don't have a camera, I'll have to describe what I got to eat this week. I started with spinach from R, freshly plucked from his garden, crispy-tender and very curly. I added my own freckles romaine baby lettuce, and plenty of lettuce that B gave to me. (She was in Ojai this Sunday and went a little hog-wild at the farmer's market.) The varieties look like cos romaine, red oak, lolla rossa and buttercrunch. She also gave me some tender new asparagus, so I steamed it along with the haricot vert string beans and baby broccoli from my garden. I chopped a huge orange sweet tequila sunrise pepper and a small but deadly orange habanero and added it to the mix. The radishes came from M's garden. They were large and pink, with pink markings on the inside. I also slivered my own celery stalks, scallions and baby fennel.
I did have a dressing, made with local olive oil, sea salt, lime juice from La Casa, Italian and lemon basil from my patio, and R's dried marjoram. I topped the salad with sweet pomegranate seeds that P gave to me.

Chayote

Rachel gave me some of these interesting squashes last year, but by the time I got to them, they were infested with bugs, and I had to throw them out. This year, I got another set, and they were doing well on the counter. Yesterday I noticed that all of them were sprouting. I planted one squash and cooked another. I still have one left for the Thanksgiving holidays.
I cooked the chayote in the microwave, and threw the cooked insides in the blender with a little water. I was unprepared for how GOOD the squash tastes plain. Creamy, green, buttery. I want to make a cold cucumber soup out of it, or any kind of soup, or a dip, or maybe try to pickle it.
I have grown this plant before. R donated a plant every spring for the garden plot we had for the food bank. I took care of it all summer, waited patiently for it to flower and fruit, took bags and bags of the squash to the food bank and tore the whole plant down after a hard frost, but I had never eaten it. The final year, the weight of the plant broke the metal trellis, and we tried planting another one in the back 40, but unfortunately it died.
This spring I will have to rig up some sort of sturdy trellis and grow it in an area that is protected by frost.

Bean Wars

My late beans are finally in! They seem to take so long this time of year, but well worth the wait. The first of the new crop of haricot verts was in this Monday, and now we are fighting over who gets to eat them all. I have only a few plants, but I am getting about one serving per day.
I had such good luck with this variety in the cold spring that it is here for another round. Hopefully the crop will keep going until the peas are ready. That may be a long time, since the first planting of peas is being trimmed mightily by some hungry animal.

Pumpkin at the Potluck

The pumpkin soup I had been planning all year for the potluck was a hit! The hardest part was growing the pumpkins. I started seedlings in February, and got some of them into the ground by March. The Cinderella pumpkin seedlings were transplanted a bit later in April. Both pumpkin patches had lots of compost that I made through the spring and summer of 2008 with horse manure from a friend, food waste from the local food bank and garden refuse. In the early spring, I cleaned out a friend's chicken coop, so the chicken manure was also added to the soil.
Now that I have shared the recipe for the compost and the soil, here's the recipe for the soup. I cooked the squash and made the broth the day before, prepared the tureen on the morning of the potluck and then did all the other stuff shortly before eating. I fully cooked the tureen two days later and it will take us another month to eat it all. That was one big pumpkin!
Soup
1 butternut squash
1 small eating-type pumpkin (I used Baby Pam)
1 Cinderella pumpkin
1 orange or red sweet pepper
2 red serrano peppers
1/2 cup raw walnuts
2 leeks
several green onions
several ribs celery
1 clove garlic
1 t coriander
olive oil
salt
water

Cut the squash and small pumpkin into pieces, remove the seeds for another use, and simmer in a large pan with 1/2 inch of water, covered, for 20 minutes. Let it cool gradually while you are doing everything else.
Soak the walnuts for several hours, and throw the soaking water into the compost pile.
Chop the bottom part of the leek, the white part of the onion, the bottom part of the celery, peppers and garlic, reserving the veggie tops, leaves and skins for broth. Saute the chopped veggies in olive oil until tender and let cool until they are easily handled.
Finely chop the veggie tops and leaves and put in a pan and cover with water, simmer for 5 minutes, cover and let cool for 15 minutes.
Strain the broth and add to a blender with the walnuts. Puree on high until smooth. Pour into a large pot.
Add the sauteed veggies to the blender and puree with additional water until they are smooth. Put the veggies through a food mill and add them to the large pot.
Scoop out the squash and small pumpkin pulp and put through the food mill and add it to the large pot. Add more water or broth until you get the desired consistency.
Toast the coriander seeds until they are fragrant and then grind with a mortar and pestle, and add to the pot. Season with salt to taste. Heat on simmer, stirring, until warm enough to serve.

Tureen recipe.
Cut an opening in the top of the Cinderella pumpkin like for a Jack-o-lantern, scoop out the seeds and strings, put the lid back on and place on a large baking pan and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. This is enough to get rid of the raw taste but not enough to cause the pumpkin to cave in. The flesh of this pumpkin is not scooped out and used for the soup.
While the tureen is still warm, add the hot soup.
The tureen will store very well in the fridge with the lid on for a couple of days, and can then be fully cooked and used for even more soup. You can also toast all the pumpkin and squash seeds the next day as long as they are washed and dried well.

Apple Time

This week has been the time for apples. I have a dear gardening friend who has a few trees, and like myself, not enough time or freezer space to save everything. The dehydrator has been on most of the week, and I have several large containers of the sweet and chewy dried treats.
When I got the first of this year's apples, I made a ton of applesauce. We are tired of it now, and I am tired of cooking it.

29 pounds!

I wish I could say that 29 pounds is the amount of weight I lost so far on the locavore diet, but I have even better news. With just one last pumpkin in the field, it looks like the largest is in, weighing in at the title weight.
It looks pretty nice curing on the patio, and next to it, the baby pie pumpkins look like sungold tomatoes.
This summer I have successfully replaced corn with pumpkins and squash as my ubiquitous food ingredient. I enjoy pumpkin and walnut shakes for breakfast, pumpkin butter, squash chips, squash pickles, pumpkin with applesauce and blueberries for an evening snack, squash "spaghetti", pumpkin seeds, pumpkin seed milk, cheese-stuffed squash blossoms.

Fall is here!

Not according to the weather, only according to what is being planted and harvested in the garden. The tomatoes are finishing up and I am tearing them out to get the soil ready for fall. I have already planted broccoli, onion, parsley, chard and cauliflower seedlings, and direct-planted bush beans, spinach, daikon radish, and several kinds of kale. I am harvesting many leek seeds, the late amaranth, and the last of the dry beans.
I also direct-seeded lettuce seedlings today. This is the earliest I have attempted lettuce. I just got tired of cleaning and winnowing some seed, so I just decided to toss it into some shady nooks and see what happens. Every year I push the seasons just a little but, but this is the first time I have planted the coolest crops when it is near 100 degrees outside.
I also tried to clean out more of the overgrown chard, and I scattered the seedlings all about. I don't even bother to plant that much chard anymore, unless I need a specific color. This fall, I am looking forward to a variety of gold and red volunteers.