The Fruits of Autumn

Suddenly, Colorado has noticed that it's Fall. The leaves are changing, the days are getting chilly, and E's evening walks are getting darker. For me, this means it is time to start baking and cooking again. I never really want to cook in the summer, which works out okay because Ray is usually pretty happy to grill. But now that it's cooler, it's time to get cooking. I'm eyeballing that slow cooker and dreaming of sloppy joes, soups, and roasts. But we're not quite there yet.

In the meantime, I have this:

I think you should try to guess, first.

We're eating a lot more fruit and vegetables with E around, so I decided we needed to try a CSA this year. Ray decided we should get a fruit share, which I'm thankful for after seeing fennel for the fourth week in a row in the vegetable shares. What does one do with that much fennel?

Fortunately, I do know what to do with apples. We're getting a peck of vegetables a week. Eamon recognizes the white bags and excitedly yells "apple, apple"... which unfortunately means "peach", and they're out of season now. But he loved the peaches and nectarines, and now he's happy with the plums. We still have a lot of apples, more than is probably even healthy for three people to eat in one week (and this is a "single" share!)  Thanks to Jana and her friends the Meyers, we got to go to an awesome apple picking party, and we got even MORE apples. So I've been making a lot of applesauce for the freezer, along with some baking. Jana pointed out that you can throw other things into the applesauce... which resulted in the picture above. The top pot is strawberry mango applesauce. The bottom pot got the plums that were about to go over the hill. For once, I didn't touch the color at all. That is some shocking applesauce! (So, is that what you guessed?)

Halloween color aside, it is darn good!