and now, back to fall

Well, now that our (wonderful and long anticipated) beach trip has come and gone it is time to get back to the regularly scheduled programming...... fall in the mountains!

(that's the cute sweater Claire just got from her buddy Keegan)

I have no hesitation in calling October my favorite month and just in the last few days we've starting to see the beginning of the leaf changes around here.  Sugar maples and hickories seem to be the first to turn in our neck of the woods, and several of the larger ones in our neighborhood are brilliantly shining right now in their orange and golden seasonal costumes.  This evening, as I walked with Claire and Wolfie as Mike got some chili and cornbread cooking (because that's one of the first things we make when the weather starts to shift towards chilly) I noticed a few large sugar maples (there aren't really that many of them down here) and wondered what the possibility would be of us talking some of our neighbors into letting us tap their trees next year.  Kind of like a little spread out pseudo-suburban Black Mountain mini sugarbush.  Or something like that.  If we could get enough people to give us the okay, we could tap several trees and then when the time comes to boil it down, give each property owner a small jar of the syrup and hopefully have enough for us to not have to buy it for a while.  We'll see.  When we lived up north Mike tapped several trees on one of our professor's land, boiled it down over the fire for hours and we were left with maybe 2 or 3 pints of syrup.  Certainly a lot of sap is needed for very little syrup, but I figure it's worth looking into.  It's such good stuff.

So anyway, fall isn't maple syrup time, but those beautiful trees just got me thinking and dreaming....


This last week, we've been up to a bit of this and that~

We picked pears from a tree in town that sits on a piece of property that has been unoccupied for a couple of years.  We've got quite a large box of pears and I need to get to work on turning them into something..... chutney, cardamom-spiced pear butter, pear sauce, pear preserves?  All of the above?

We welcomed back the chilly nights and had our first fire of the year a few nights ago when the temperature dipped into the 40s.

The cool winds brought with them a sudden motivation to "batten the hatches"..... finish stacking wood, get the garden ready for the winter, plant the garlic, put away the potting bench.....

I made a pot of soup the other night that I have deemed "Welcome fall" soup.  It was a bit of an experiment based largely on what I had at hand and the fact that it was chilly and I wanted soup.  It went like this:

saute one large yellow onion, 2-3 medium parsnips and 3 (or so) large cloves of garlic in butter and olive oil~ add chicken stock (I used 2 quarts of homemade stock and therefore had to season the soup quite well with salt since there was none in the broth) and one large diced butternut squash. Add some thyme and a large handful (2 cups or so) of chopped kale. Simmer until squash is tender.  Mash it all up a bit with a potato masher. Serve with parsley and garlic chives.  Sourdough bread.  Butter.  A salad.


I thought it was quite tasty, especially the second day.  I'm excited to use this as a jumping off point for future soups, adding a bit of...... I don't know.......white beans? sweet potatoes? roasted apples? hmmmm.....

I'd also like to add that until this, I hadn't really eaten parsnips all that much.  Oh wow.  Definitely growing parsnips next year~

Claire decorated one of the little pumpkins from our garden with markers.... pretty cute sitting on her bedside table (an old apple crate):

And just because we're already in there now, here's a peek into her room.  Not quite finished (whatever that means), and certainly not used for anything like sleeping just yet... but her room, all the same.

Good night.  Sleep tight.  Welcome fall, in all your brilliant beautiful glory~