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Community Garden: Out with Summer, In with Fall

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Fall!

It has finally arrived. Though I’ve been unsuccessfully attempting to will it so over the last two weeks, a storm blew in on Thursday and brought with it a thirty degree temperature drop and a taste of delicious autumn.

I know that my brief escapades in denim and corduroy this weekend aren’t permanent and that it’s supposed to bounce back into the high 70s this week, but the effect will remain.

If  you know me even a little bit, I’ve probably discussed with uncanny fervor my love of fall. Absolutely my favorite season, no question. And there are so many ways to enjoy it!

Apple picking.

Pumpkin picking.

Pumpkin carving.

Pumpkin anything.

10,398 fall recipes, and an equal number for Halloween.

Halloween! Thanksgiving!

Corn mazes, hay rides, haunted trails, haunted houses, ghost tours!, amusement parks, baseball games. Halloween parties, Renaissance festival, a costume for each of those.  Appalachians for the leaves, farmers market for the food, and travel for the joy of sharing the season with friends and family. The color orange. The color brown. Chrysanthemums. Corn husks. Bountiful harvest of squashes, roots, apples, pears, cabbages, potatoes, and onions.

This year, for the first time, I’m adding a new one to my fall activity guide: fall garden! The garden I grew up with was winding down by this point in September, but here, I’ve only just put a new batch of seeds in the ground. I now have a second plot for the fall and winter, so in addition to mucking out some of the summer plants that have gone to seed, I spent a couple of very dirty mornings preparing the new bed, and my original one, for planting.

One of the benefits of a community garden is that there are all kinds of people who want to help out in all kinds of ways. Recently, a local composting company donated a massive pile of freshly composted, loamy, nutritious top soil to our garden for us to refill our plots. The catch is that it could not be directly deposited into the beds, that was up to me, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow.

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Rich Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Buttercream

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Here’s the thing.

Most of my choices of meals to make revolve around what I want for dinner, what features a local ingredient at the peak of its season, or what has been leering at me the strongest from my list of recipes to try.

But sometimes I just want to make cake. Unnecessary, frivolous, decadent, indulgent, cake.

I don’t often make desserts, partially because we rarely have more than the two of us at dinner. But when I threw my pizza party a couple weeks ago, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make something fancy.


Both the recipes and the inspiration for this cake came from a blog I recently stumbled across (and have subsequently become obsessed with) called Sweetapolita. These cakes are something. else. Miracles of butter and sugar. They are simple yet stunning, classic yet unique.

And the best part? This particular chocolate cake recipe is, hands down, the easiest cake recipe I have ever made. Many cakes recipes have intricate patterns of adding dry ingredients, folding in damp ones, carefully mixing until consistency is just so… not this one.

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Chicken Pot Pie(s)

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Okay, before I dive into this one, I need a favor. I have a bit of bloggie housekeeping to take care of, and it’s a bit embarrassing. Long story short, I recently installed a plug-in affecting the feed that I didn’t realize I needed when I initially launched the site. Sooooo if you have subscribed to the RSS feed, I would very much appreciate it if you would unsubscribe… and then resubscribe again and refresh the reader. Live and learn, I suppose. I appreciate your help!

Now to the tasty business.

This may be a staple comfort food for some of you, but I don’t think I ever had chicken pot pie until Brad insisted I try some of the Marie Callender one he had one night in college.  I was… not particularly wowed.

This recipe changed all that. I my original intent  in seeking out this recipe was as a surprise look-I-made-you-one-of-your-favorite-meals-ever dinner after Brad’s first round of law school exams. The look on his face when I finally let him out of the study (wouldn’t be a very good surprise if he could see what I was making, would it?) was like a six-year old’s at Christmas.

The original recipe I found for this claimed to make one 9-inch pie. With the adjustments I made, I have ended up with TWO 9-inch pies both times I’ve made it, which yields delicious homemade lunch for the next few days.  Tasty lunch, too. Also, it’s very flexible to veggie preference. Prefer potato over corn? Broccoli over peas? Both or either would probably be delicious. I like the crunch offered by the celery and the carrots, so I definitely recommend leaving them in if you’re gonna play mix-and-match, but it’s your pie, do what you like. Within reason…

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Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

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Before I say anything else: Happy Mother’s Day!

Since moving away for college eight years ago (eek), I haven’t been able to spend Mother’s Day with my mom. I think I’ve lucked out for Father’s Day a couple of times as June was more conducive to cross-country travel, but Mom has had to settle for phone calls and packages.

This is a special Mother’s Day, too. My mom is retiring this year after decades of work in elementary libraries and classrooms, teaching young Coloradoans (myself included) to read, to write, and to appreciate books. I have many fond memories over the years of going to the library with my mom for work and for fun, of stapling long strips of playful bulletin board borders to the edges of her displays, of ogling over the annual book fair catalogs and knowing that if there was one place she would buy us anything we asked for, it was books. Her fervor for the written word has, no doubt, cultivated my own passion for books and penchant for writing. She’s the #1 fan of this little food blog and tenders her support through comments, encouragement, and little e-mails alerting me to typos (which, by the way, I welcome from ANYONE who spots one – I want to squash typos out like bugs). So thanks Mom! For everything. I wish I could spend today with you!

But since I can’t, how about blog-worthy pie?

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Easter Eggs + Deviled Eggs

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If Easter eggs are your thing, you have probably already dyed yours and let them spend their happy morning in a pile of scraggly plastic grass. So while this might not provide you with a must-try kitchen adventure for this weekend, I still want to tell you about the brief, but bizarre, life of my Easter eggs this year.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve used the standard effervescent tablets of color in mis-matched coffee mugs to dye eggs. This year I saw not one but three different suggestions for techniques to dye eggs with vegetable dyes. Perfect! A lifelong tradition that could be easily adjusted to accommodate my transition to local food. Easy right?

Mmmmm not as easy as I’d hoped.

Obtaining the dyes was not too difficult. I needed beets (readily available at the farmer’s market right now), red cabbage, and turmeric. Okay, so the turmeric is in no way, shape, or form local. But it seemed to be the most prevalent suggestion for creating a golden-hued egg, so I gave it a shot. Other than that, water, vinegar, and salt were easy to come by.

Next! I saw a technique to achieve beautiful eggs stenciled with leaves and flowers. A few minutes wandering around my apartment property provided a few stenciling options. A couple pairs of hose chopped into egg-friendly pouches later, some friends came over to partake in the vegetable dyeing experience.

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