Final Harvest

This overgrown mess was what was left of our garden this weekend after two frosts and a summer plagued by rain, slugs, bunnies, deer and neglect.

I pulled out the dead stalks of tomatoes, stacking their cages under the deck for next year--hopefully a more sunny and tomato-friendly season. I shook the tomatillos free of their thick, woody stems, and collected a couple gallons of them (this basket is only the tip of the tomatillo iceberg).

And spent Sunday afternoon husking them--there were hundreds, but most of the fruits had only grown to the size of a marble.

Now they await boiling, pureeing and freezing for winter-warming enchilada sauce (cooked together with onions from our garden, jalapenos or serranos grown, roasted and frozen last summer, and some fresh cilantro--guess I should start a windowsill pot of that!)

Two seed packets of two different types of poblanos yielded only half a pound of peppers (nothing like last year's harvest--though that was mostly hot peppers, I did get a few decent poblanos!)

There were too few too small peppers for any hope of chiles rellenos (sniff, sniff), so instead I made this casserole (from this book) with rice, cheese, tomatoes and my meagre poblano supply (which were even too small to peal after roasting so I just pureed them in the blender and hoped for the best!) It was quite tasty.