In summer the kitchen becomes a studio where I create things to eat incorporating fruit and vegetables from the garden. Experimentation is the rule, with a mind for the palates of both of us. I make a lot of dishes that don’t appear any other time but when the garden is coming in.

Tradition is also part of it. Apples are part of my family heritage. I wrote about a visit to Wise County, Virginia:

Something that goes through everything is the presence of apples. Grandma worked in an apple cannery, had orchards. There is an apple tree on the old home place, Aunt Carrie served fresh applesauce for us, she said a day hasn’t gone by when she hasn’t had apples. Uncle Gene talked a lot about the apples and how he and the boys helped with them. And everywhere we ate them, the apples were good, the trees bearing fruit. The apple trees bearing lots, even the ones abandoned for years. Eat them green, cooked, fried, in applesauce.

The applesauce in the photo is made from Zestar! apples, and likely the best of this year’s crop. The apples were bug-bitten and didn’t look like much. However, the sweet and tangy taste they produced in my sauce is unlike anything else I have tasted. The crop made two and a half quarts of applesauce, which I will keep in the refrigerator until it is all used.

Pickles have been a struggle. Early on, when I expanded my Big Grove garden, I pickled every cucumber we didn’t eat fresh. That was a mistake insofar as there are ten-year old jars of sweet pickles canned and resting on the shelf. The recipe for the refrigerator pickles in the photo produces a flavor I haven’t found in commercial pickles. They are quite good. I keep making them until the shelf gets full and then give the excess cucumbers to the food pantry or juice them.

Current challenges include what to do with the small daikon radish; making summer zucchini bread; making a batch of soup from fresh vegetables; and clearing freezer space for celery, more greens, and scraps of vegetables to use in making broth. Making space in the freezer is the biggest of these.

Why garden if one is not going to make dishes from produce coming into the kitchen the same day it was picked? It is part of living a good life.