SEPT. 7 UPDATE: Produce report

This summer, in addition to building this house and bringing a new child into the world, we attempted to have a big garden. The planting went well, but the weeding ... didn't happen. Surprisingly, we're still getting a good deal of produce from that garden.

So I called out to Dave this morning as he was working in the shop and asked him to stop by the garden before he came in to get me a squash for Sunday dinner.

This is what I saw when I walked into the kitchen later:

Mind you, these are those nice dainty yellow squash that are normally the size of a cucumber. But we were not cowed by its size! Dave made a good size roasting pan full of squash -- using about one-eighth of that monster. It was actually quite good, but the key to its flavor was Better than Bouillon. (If I make any vegetable dish that has any flavor whatsoever, BTB is generally the secret.)

The other seven-eighths of the squash was left. I asked Dave what he planned to do with that, thinking he'd say we'd either cook it and freeze it, or that it wasn't worth the bother and we'd compost it.

He said he had an urge to put it on top of a fence post and shoot it. Take that, monster squash!


It's a good year for apples! My parents have one apple tree that goes through good years and not-so-good years, and we're apparently on an upswing. These are mostly just windfall apples that Dave and Sofia picked the other evening.

Normally, processing those apples isn't that awful a task because we could round up two nifty gizmos that made the work a lot easier: apple peeler-corer-slicers. Unfortunately, my dad's broke in the middle of processing last night, and the other one, which is ours, is packed away, somewhere, in one of the many boxes we have stuffed in this house.

So, my sister, my dad and I went at that wheelbarrow full of apples this afternoon armed only with standard kitchen tools. We still got nine quarts of sliced apples into the freezer this afternoon, and my sister made an apple crisp for supper.

We're borrowing another peeler-corer-slicer before we take on the rest of the wheelbarrow, though, and we might buy yet another before we take on the apples left on the tree.


... Dave has been doing some work in the house, too: Right now he's working on building the railing.

... No word from the siding crew on when they might show up this week, though we're supposed to be next, after they finish the shingling job they're on.