Half the fun of growing pumpkins is getting to carve them. This year was no exception. The two big pumpkins turned out really well. Charmaine did all the design work for them, Brett used his mini sawzall to cut out the designs, and I supervised. You may be thinking I didn’t help enough, but it’s hard to argue with results like these.
After tilling the garden under, we took a break and headed to Mexico for a week. When we came back it was snowing. Then it snowed again the next day. Then it snowed a third time the day after that. The snow didn’t stick around long, but I was still mildly surprised to get 6 inches of snow the week before Halloween. Finally I decided to take a couple pictures. The snow was the thickest on the deck and on the lawn. It melted fairly quickly from the patio. Those bumps you see on the deck are the squash we thought may survive outside. We were wrong.
The gardening season is officially over. We have had frost every day for a week now, so we spent a few minutes last night picking the rest of the peppers and squash. Today we fired up the tiller and made quick work of the garden and weeds that had grown along the side yards. It’s really amazing what that little Pony can do.
The question of what to do with all the Habanero Peppers has been weighing on my mind. They are so good, but so powerful. I’ve given away many, but people are reluctant to take very many, due to the power of these Caribbean peppers.
As luck would have it, I gave a few Habaneros to a friend at work. He made an excellent Habanero Jelly and brought some back to work. It was amazing. Suddenly I knew what I would do with the rest of the peppers… make jelly. We found a recipe at Culinary Cafe, but it didn’t use enough Habaneros. It only calls for “5 to 10” Habaneros per batch, and I wasn’t about to make 5 batches with the 40 to 50 peppers I had just picked. Instead, we would just increase the heat. Instead of “5 to 10” we would use “10 to 20”. That was a stroke of genius. I can’t get enough of it.
The summer just keeps on going, so we get to keep eating fresh veggies. The last couple weeks we’ve been cutting winter squash into cubes and grilling it with butter and nutmeg. Everything tastes better with nutmeg. Last week we did Butternut and Buttercup. This week we did Banana, Pumpkin, and more Buttercup (the current favorite). We also did skewers of potatoes and onions with zesty Italian salad dressing. Britt brought a Honeydew and wrapped small cubes of it in some Prosciutto. We made fresh salsa and guacamole that got eaten as soon as we made them. All that freshness really went well with the grass-finished steaks. Jessica made shortcake and whipped up some cream to have with the fresh peaches from the farmer’s market. Charmaine even made some pumpkin spice bread from a couple of our little Sugar Pumpkins. What a great meal.
