Comfort of the Harvest

Comfort

by Danielle French South Pond Farms www.southpondfarms.ca

Photo by Jodi Pudge Photography

The fall is the season, like spring, that is thoroughly welcome. We have waited, not necessarily always patiently, through cold months and ready to shed heavy clothes and watch the ice leave the front porch (or sidewalks) in favour of green shoots and the smell of soft earth. This fall, with the summer having been so hot, I know I am happy about sweaters and cooler evenings. These past years, it seems the spring begins later and the warm weather stays longer in the fall. Here in the farmhouse, we start the fire in the stove early evening and let the sun warm up the house during the day. The frost always takes me by surprise, I haven’t cut all the flowers I want to dry nor taken the last tomatoes out of the garden.

Fall is all about the harvest, having time to gather and preserve and to celebrate with food. Truthfully here in the Bethany Hills, by the time the official fall calendar switches, we may have already experienced frost and much of the garden is out. But since I have lived here at the farm, we are still enjoying the bounty of the hard summer work, picking the last tomatoes, digging out the root vegetables and picking apples. Shawn is not a lover of root vegetables. It’s a funny thing since he grew up on the land - his family and many others that I’ve met here have potatoes and carrots on their plates, turnips maybe, but not parsnips, celery root and definitely not squash or sweet potatoes. I may have converted him to squash - but in small doses. Apples, on the other hand, are always in fashion with him but picked fresh on a cool day, sipped in apple cider, roasted in the oven with onion or in the best pie with a piece of sharp cheddar (a touch of my New England roots) is hard to beat. Growing up with my German mother, the harvest vegetable basket had onions, leeks, cabbages, kohlrabi, carrots and of course potatoes. Squash and sweet potatoes were not vegetables she was familiar with but having settled in New England, she became familiar with cooking squash early on. It is a staple in a hearty Vermont diet. My parents had a vegetable garden and grew a variety of things including squash. I remember one year they produced a giant hubbard squash. It was a deep dark greenish colour with bumps and a spot of yellow. It was so big, the two of them had to hold it on the counter for my dad to cut it up. The flesh inside was a deep golden yellow orange colour and when

my mom baked it - simply with a butter on top, it had an earthy flavour that I will never forget. Today you don’t see many of the hubbard squashes - they are just too big to handle in the grocery stores. Who can fit them in a cart? Their flavour isn’t as sweet as some of the other squashes (like acorn or butternut). I find that roasting all of the harvest vegetables is the easiest way to keep them tasting best all the way into the cold winter months. Here is the way my mother does it. I like this method especially leading up to the holidays. Photos by Jodi Pudge Photography

She uses acorn squash. The mighty hubbard also works but is quite a bit more effort. Preheat the oven to 350. Cut the squash in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds. Place on a roasting pan or baking sheet with sides so it won’t tip over. Sprinkle with salt and squeeze out the juice of an orange and partially fill the cavity with the juice. Roast in the oven for 1 hour or until tender - about 1 hour. Scoop out the squash and the juice into a bowl and with a potato masher, mix together adding a small about of butter. Serve with a sprinkle of nutmeg on top.