Fall Flavor

Fall Colors; Deb Marshall photo

 

It’s been a strange and sometimes glorious summer and late summer, and frost totally destroyed my squash plants and basil the other night, so even though the daytime temperatures are up into summer ranges again, it’s fair to say we’re in autumn; in fact, now the warm days count as Indian Summer, since frost happened. 

The Mouse Colony, which had a poor year last year, seems to be on the ascendant again – the furry people have been doing nightly battle with them for about three weeks now, and from the signs I’ve found behind toaster oven and spice rack, they’ve lost a few mouse warriors that they hauled upstairs from down cellar to finish off. This morning I found half the basket of unripe paste tomatoes scattered all over the dining room floor – either the furry people have taken up hockey – it is the season, the Tall Dude and the Canadian tell me – or there was a skirmish that took place amongst the veggies.

On the floor in the dining room – I choose that space because it faces west and north, and is farthest from the chapel, where our woodstove resides, so is fairly dark and relatively cool all year round – are two baskets of winter squashes, one of butternut and the other of buttercup, and three baskets of green tomatoes that I whipped out of the garden the day before the frost. Green tomatoes – besides being excellent for making fried green tomatoes, picallili, and green tomato mincemeat – will slowly ripen and while not the best flavor for fresh eating (though they’re as good or better than anything you’ll buy in the grocery store), are fine in soups and spaghetti sauces. The tomatoes on the vine have to have switched from a dull green to a shiny green before you pick them, if you want them to ripen, and you need to check them regularly – if they start to rot, they need to be moved out to the compost before they encourage bad behavior in the rest of the basket. Interestingly, tomatoes ripen from the inside out, so you don’t want to store them in the sun, which makes them mealy. 

Love Lies Bleeding and Sunflowers; Deb Marshall photo

 

One year, back in the dark ages when the Husband and I lived in an old farmhouse in Maine, we covered the floor of our very wide upstairs hall with newspapers, and covered the newspapers with green tomatoes. We had ripening tomatoes that year into January. Folks with space and healthy vines will pull the vine, green tomatoes and all, and hang them in a barn or garage or attic room for ripening, risking a sticky splatter if they don’t check the vines for ripe fruit often enough.

There’s much left to harvest in the garden. Carrots, a few beets, celeriac, parsley root are largely unharvested; the lone remaining zucchini near the house is still blossoming, saved by proximity from the last frost. Parsnips will stay in their beds, freezing over winter, to become sweet and delicious for early spring digging as soon as the snow is off. The Love Lies Bleeding has long, lovely tresses that pool about the tall plant’s feet, and the Jerusalem artichokes have just started to bloom. Nasturtiums, running wildly vine-like escaped the frost, and a few remaining scarlet runner beans and the cherry tomatoes may yet fill out and ripen. The California poppies are still abloom, and I find fava bean pods that have filled out every so many days. Even the morning glories escaped this frost; and the hardy hibiscus has still a few buds yet to open, forming huge, darkly maroon, lunch-plate-sized blossoms. The passionflower vine also sports new buds – the kaffir lime and bay tree and the non-hardy hibiscus returned to their winter homes in the chapel last weekend, but I’m hoping the passionflower will have time to bloom before I have to cut it back and haul it inside. 

Buzzy Boy the hummingbird left shortly after the first frost, which we had on 1 September; a week or so later, there were a couple of hummers using the feeder and gorging on the late –blooming flowers  in the garden, and one was, I believe, the same noisy-winged female we spotted last year, on their migration route from norther places. I haven’t seen a hummer for the last week, so will soon take in the last feeder. I hope Buzzy made it to his winter digs safely, and didn’t get swept up in the hurricanes.

Warty Pumpkin amidst dining table collection; Deb Marshall photo

All the bees I see out now are slow and move tipsily, as if drunk. It’s too cold for them even on sunny days, and by dusk, the ones who are still out are barely moving and look like ornaments.  Our fall-ripening raspberries are in full production, and I need to look carefully before I pluck, for fear of plucking a bee as well.  In a few weeks I’ll need to cut down canes that produced this year, making room for next year’s bloomers. 

Slowly the tomato cages are piling up next to the shed door, and clay pots that held spent annuals are beginning to gather. In the place of the summer beauties, pots of mums in startling colors and pumpkins in even more startling colors are herding together on the wart.  A small square of row cover material nearby imitates a will o’ wisp, as it gently flutters in the breeze.

The freezers are filling: applesauce, blueberries, tomatoes, zucchini, scarlet runner and fava beans, green peppers, corn, spaghetti sauce, a few raspberries, green and yellow beans. I’ve dug the potatoes – some with rosy red flesh, others with deep purple flesh – and the shallots are in a woven bag hanging on the wall in the pantry, and the onions are in braids hanging from pegs in the kitchen. The rosemary plant is back in the kitchen window along with a parsley plant; in the garden, tall dried dill stalks haunt the partly-empty beds, and the tarragon and sorrel look tired and worn. My one lone cilantro plant scattered its dry seeds to emerge somewhere else next spring, the calendula and Johnny-jump-ups and catnip have sent out hundreds of seeds that will take root next year, and the gladiolas, which had a terrible season, will soon need to be dug and their  bulbs stashed away in the cellar until next summer.  

Late Summer Critter; Deb Marshall photo

Scurrying about from one garden chore to another, I feel rather like a member of the Mouse Colony or Chipmunk Coterie myself.  

I’m keeping an eye on a huge, handsome hornet’s nest that hangs from a maple tree over the driveway. As soon as the hornets desert it – where do they go in winter? -  I’m going to snag it for a house decoration. The Tall Dude has a his house filled with these, and I’ve long coveted one for myself, but so far the only nests we’ve had have been built on the sides of shed doors or the corners of roofs, so came down in pieces. In a cracked antique wooden bowl that used to make a nice cat lounger, I have some decades-old paper wasp sheets from one of those nests, and the furry people will no longer venture near the bowl. Every so often I’ll take a strip out and marvel at its resilience and grey beauty. The driveway nest will find a home, still attached to its branch, somewhere in a corner near the ceiling in our living room. At the moment, that’s just a dream, as the hornets are still very busily going in and out, doing whatever it is hornets do with their days. 

The hornet's nest I covet; Deb Marshall photo

Most the sunflowers have turned their heavy heads down, now, and I’m starting to see the empty shells left behind by birds in the cups of the flower head backs. One tall many-flowered giant was so heavily burdened it actually fell over; I hefted it up and rested it on the back fence so the birds can get at its seeds. I hear them fluttering away working on seed removal when I’m in the garden.  And now that so many of the tomato plants and giant squashes have been pulled – I discovered that the butternut was climbing the scarlet runner bean’s fence – I can see the solar-powered orb that changes colors in the night more clearly from the wart when I let the barkie boys out to pee at night.  This orb is a plastic ball that was designed to float in a swimming pool, delivering some cleaning fluid; I put it atop the pedestal of the birdbath, saved after I dropped and broke the bowl during garden clean-up last fall. Watching the ball turn red-green-blue-violet-white makes my French-Canadian blood sing with joy, and that gets me thinking it’s almost time to make corton for Mom’s birthday.

Grape Vines and Mountain Ash berries; Deb Marshall photo

Corton is a French-Canadian pate. My great-grandparents had it on their table always, and we often had some made by my meme; we ate it on buttered toast in the morning for breakfast, and it also makes a nifty sandwich. There are many recipes for it; Meme didn’t have one, but I watched her make it many times and, hey, if you can cook, you can usually figure these things out. Traditionally it’s made with ground pork butt; I prefer to use grass-fed beef, beefalo or bison. Here’s the basic recipe:

Corton

 

1 lb or more of ground pork butt or beef, bison, etc.

A whole lot of minced garlic – start with 4 large cloves, and work up from there

Ground cloves (the spice, not the allium)

Salt

If you’re using beef/bison rather than pork, some good butter

Olive oil

A little water

2 or 3 small bowls to pack it into

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan large enough to hold the meat easily.  Add the meat and garlic, and stir, stir, stir, breaking up the meat into tiny pieces, incorporating the oil, and not letting it brown. To this end, add a little water as needed to help keep it from frying – you’re really boiling the meat in oil, and the water should thoroughly boil off before you’re done, so don’t use too much. Pork butt is quite fatty so you won’t need much olive oil but might need more water; beef/bison is quite lean, so you’ll need more olive oil and less water. As the meat becomes well-broken-up and begins to look partly cooked, add salt (try 1 tsp for 1 lb of meat) and ground cloves (try 1 tsp for 1 lb of meat). Continue to stir, and when the meat looks cooked through, taste it and adjust seasonings. The flavor of clove and garlic should be clearly present, not subtle. When well-seasoned, if using beef/bison, or if your pork was not very fatty, add several tablespoons of butter and stir in thoroughly.

The fat in the pork, or the butter you’ve added, causes the meat to hold together in a paste when it cools – think cat food consistency. (In fact, when we were kids, we used to compare the way it looked to Calo cat food!) Press it into your bowls, pressing down to take out all air pockets and cause the oil/butter/fat to partly rise to the top and make a thin layer. Cover tightly and put in the frig to cool.

Once cooled, it will have the consistency of – well - cat food, which is pate consistency. It spreads easily on hot toast, and buttering the toast first adds a second level of unctuousness. Brought to room temperature, it will spread easily on slices of baguette.  If it doesn’t, you didn’t add enough butter – make a note for next time! Corton is traditionally eaten with cornichon (a kind of sour pickle) to balance the fat. It also makes a fine sandwich when paired with a nice seedy mustard.  Some people’s recipes include the addition of cinnamon and bread crumbs, but my version matches the flavor and mouth-feel of Meme’s perfectly. It was traditionally made at the same time the Christmas/New Year’s pork pies were made, using the same fatty cut of pork and similar seasonings  - unless  you made it all the time, as my great-grandparents did. 

Bon appetite!

Cardinal whirligig and morning glories; Deb Marshall photo

For the blog, October 3, 2017

Hardy hibiscus; Deb Marshall photo