Gifts from the Earth

I have been eating like a queen these days, tasting the harvest from my gardens, from the local farmer's gardens, and from Leah who has been harvesting chicken and hen of the wood mushrooms the past few weeks.

I have a steady supply of mesclun, arugula, I just picked the last batch of beans the other day, and am still harvesting peppers and Swiss chard. The basil is done, but the other herbs are still green and lush, and there are some greens in my garden that will survive beyond the first frost.

I am sad that soon there will be no more tomatoes, one of my favorite summer fruits. And soon I no longer be sinking my teeth into fabulous freshly picked corn. My freezer does have some frozen tomatoes, peppers and beans to pull out in the dead of winter to remind me of the season to come.

I have been looking for farm stands selling baskets of tomatoes for far less than the 2.00 a pound that they sell for. Since I lost most of mine, I did not get to make any sauce, as I ate the ones that survived the blight. However, it has been a long time since I have seen those bargain baskets of tomatoes; perhaps the farmers too did not have a surplus crop. It has become cheaper to buy organic canned tomatoes instead; they don't make such a bad sauce with the right ingredients. But I still love the process of putting up a sauce, a memory from my late teen years where my girlfriend and I "cooked with honey:, made tons of salads and home made quiches, at a time when all was new, wonderful, painful, incredible, and very, very saucy.

We are lucky that the farmer's market goes through November here, which is fairly late. Further north and west, some have already closed. So through the late fall, we will eat of the harvest of the local earth. I will switch from corn to squash, basil to rosemary, radishes to potatoes.

And its all wonderful.

patti o farmer

Art titled "Food For Thought" about genetically modified foods.....