signs of fall
Changing leaves are very well—very well, this year—but there are other more impactful signs of fall around here lately. Saturday night saw our first freeze of the winter, so the garden looks a whole lot different now than it did before the weekend. I'd taken out the slicing tomato plants and the romas already, but the cherry tomatoes were still going strong. They did fantastic this year: I kind of wish we had been able to quantify how many we picked, but even if we'd been willing to take the time to weigh all the tomatoes we brought inside, that would still have missed the hundreds that we ate right there in the garden. But I think its fair to estimate that we enjoyed hundreds of dollars worth of tomatoes this summer. They took up a commensurate amount of space, too, as they kept growing and sprawling from May through October. Now they're gone, and the garden looks flat and empty. Neat, too. (There's still some greens growing, but they don't bulk nearly as large.) Now it's time to start planning for next year! The garlic will need to go in before the end of the month... where should we put it?
It's also the season of cold mornings in the house, which means morning baking! Today I made pumpkin muffins to share with our school friends. Only I noticed something with our new oven. See, when our last one broke it was the electronics that went wrong: the heating part was still fine. But since they're connected we had to replace the whole thing. To keep that from happening again we bought the most basic, no-frills model, with no kind of digital components to possibly go wrong. It works great! It also doesn't have a window in the front: I guess that also counts as a frill. Only, without the window, I find it hardly heats up the kitchen at all! Great in the summertime when we're baking bread, but in the winter heat in the kitchen is half the point! It makes me wonder how much energy we wasted in all the other years—heat that wasn't cooking our food! It also makes me wish for a wood-burning stove... now that's fall comfort!