Seizing September

Don't you love this time of year?!  Warm days and cool nights, nights when you can hear the crickets through the open window while you stay warm under your patchwork quilt.  With a hint of crispness in the air, it is the beginning of harvest season when everything in the garden seems to ripen all at once!  Now, we are so glad our work in the garden has paid off, but at the same time, are getting a little tired of eating tomatoes at every meal!  
And the mere sight of fennel...

I can hardly believe the brilliance of the nasturtiums!  They are growing in great mounds in the garden and have even started to blend with the sweet potatoes!  I believe that Monet grew nasturtiums, and it's no wonder, they are so vivid and whimsical!

 Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, potatoes, onions, leeks, celeriac, zucchini, squash, fennel, chard, beets, beans, kale, 

garlic and herbs!  

OH MY!  

I love it when a plant just starts growing in the brush-pile!  It's like a little present, and this pumpkin plant is definitely a present!  We have two radiant pumpkins growing on our volunteer vine!

There are also some lovely morning glories covering the brush pile!  I have always been taken with their velvety petals.

This has been a wonderful year for peaches!  We always get some from local growers to freeze (and of course eat fresh!).  A friend of ours also gave us some peaches, so the only sane thing to do was make a peach cobbler!

I find the best music to encourage culinary inspiration is French chanson réaliste!  I almost always listen to it in the kitchen!  My current favorite album is Chansons by Jill Barber. 

Here is a piece of the lovely cobbler!  It tastes like 

"summer on a plate!"

We have some delightful dill growing in our garden, as well as an overabundance of green beans, so let me share with you a secret formula for one of our all time favorites:

Dill + Green Beans = Dilly Beans

So, already feeling industrious after making cobbler, I decided to make a small batch of Dilly Beans from the recipe in the Ball Blue Book.  They turned out delightfully dilly.

"By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer's best of weather

And autumn's best of cheer."

-Helen Hunt Jackson