Baking and Canning: What’s Left of the Garden

This morning I baked pumpkin bread, with a recipe I like that uses olive oil and mostly whole wheat pastry flour. It is delicious for an afternoon break or even breakfast.

I like to throw pumpkin seeds on the top, a bit of lily gilding…

Later, I went to the garden to see what was still there. Flowers. The calendulas have come on now that it is cool.

I’ve had these blooming in December.

The zinnias are still blooming, but showing a lot more flower heads whose seeds will need to be scattered.

And along with the zinnias there were honey bees and bumble bees, getting what they still can.

I brought home chard, kale, beet greens and parsley. Did I mention the parsley is looking so delicious, also because it’s cooled off?

That’s a stealth zinnia blossom in there.

And then there are the green tomatoes. I had some before I went to Chicago for a few days and today I got more. Some people think they ripen, and sometimes they get red, but if picked green, they often just taste like store tomatoes, so I decided to pickle some.

The garlic came from my garden this past summer.

It’s a simple recipe and really doesn’t take long, so I worked it into the afternoon, sterilizing the jars and stuffing them,

giving them a 10 minute boil,

and finally lifting them out to cool.

For years, the idea of pickled green tomatoes seemed pretty disgusting to me, but one year in order to avoid wasting them, I made these, tried them, and became a convert. At some point, I’d like to figure out how to reduce the quantity on my grandmother’s mock mincemeat recipe, which calls for green tomatoes (a peck), some quantity of apples, and sugar, raisins and nuts in the pounds. It was delicious stuff, but since I don’t can in that quantity, it needs some calculation! Meanwhile I’ll keep watch on these, which have a chance to get bigger, if not completely mature.