Autumn Pleasures: Recipes and Tips for Stocking-Up

Recipes for: Pumpkin Pie, Crumb-free Cornbread, Amazing Quince and 'Nooks and Crannies' Hot Cereal

Autumn is a time for enjoying the bounty of the garden. Every bite of cucumber or tomato takes on special pleasure knowing the season is almost at an end. We enjoy preserving foods for later consumption; whether through canning, dehydration or freezing. It's also a time for seasonal favorites like pumpkin pie from scratch. Here is a collection of relevant posts to expand your autumn pleasure and help you squirrel away some of the season's bounty for leaner, winter times. Enjoy!

Stocking up: Whether your motivation is to ride out a short-term power-outage, make less frequent trips to the grocery store, hedge your bets against the rising cost of food by taking advantage of sales or just to avert that sinking feeling when you go to your cupboards and there's nothing you really want to eat, this Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry offers many simple ideas and habits to keep your pantry 'topped off'. Note: the link will take you to All Things Sharing, our blog about positive things happening in the world.

Autumn at the Sharing Gardens; a time of beauty and bounty!

Amazing Quince! - Sugar-free Recipe (LINK): Many people are unfamiliar with quince though it's becoming more popular. Its tart apple flavor has undertones of pears and rose oil. It can be cooked into homemade applesauce, dehydrated for fruit leather or be baked as a stand-alone autumn treat. Be sure to read the full post and comments to read about other recipes and improvements we made on our methods of preparation. Nutritional benefits of quince. (image LT: www.modernfarmer.com)

Making Pumpkin Pie from Scratch - Recipe (LINK)

Pumpkin Pie recipe: Though it's a lot easier just to open a can of pumpkin puree to make your favorite pumpkin pie recipe, there's nothing that compares with the satisfaction of growing your own (or buying from a local farmer) and making enough puree as a base for pies all throughout the fall and winter. This post will help you avoid making common mistakes: Making Pumpkin Pie from Scratch - Recipe. (image RT: Llyn's niece, Jesse during her first autumn harvest, 4 months old).

Mix up a big batch of the dry ingredients for Crumb-Free, Whole-Grain Cornbread Recipe and you'll always have it on hand for a quick baked treat.

Cornbread recipe: We make large batches of the dry ingredients for this delicious Crumb-Free, Whole-Grain Cornbread Recipe. This makes it easy to just add the eggs, oil and other liquids, pop it in the oven and have a comfort-food snack or side dish for a larger meal, a quick dish to take to a last-minute pot-luck invitation or unexpected guests.

We grow two kinds of corn for our hot cereal. Hooker's Blue (left) and Golden Bantam (right). Though we've tried to keep the strains pure, corn is notorious for cross-pollinating, hence the variety in color. Grow your own Sorghum for grain and flour (LINK)

'Nooks and Crannies' hot breakfast cereal RECIPE (LINK): This recipe for hot cereal starts with the basics: mixed grains,nuts and dried fruit but it goes much further, offering suggestions for toppings that will make this a delicious power-house of nutrition that provides energy all morning long. Though we've been fortunate these past few years to grow enough of many of the ingredients ourselves, you'll find almost everything you need in a well-stocked bulk-foods section. Remember to buy organically grown ingredients: better for your health and better for the Earth. (RT: Tiffaney removing corn from the cobs using a homemade tool.)

And lastly, though not part of the main topics of this post, here is some really inspiring news about a river in England that was encouraged to return to its original meandering course. Not only did this encourage many kinds of wildlife to return but the new river's pathway and the subsequent wetlands this created served to mitigate flooding of the downstream towns and villages during record-breaking wet years of rainfall. (Note: the link will take you to All Things Sharing, our blog about positive things happening in the world.) LINK: What happens when you set a river free?

Double-rainbow seen to the north of our land.

Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry

The autumn season always brings out the 'inner squirrel' in me! Time to clean out our pantries and use up or pass along to others anything getting close to its 'best by' date (or, if past that, compost or toss it out). Once clean and organized, I love restocking our pantries with the many foods we've harvested and preserved over the summer.

But even if you don't have a lot of food you've grown or preserved yourself, autumn is a great time to take refresh your pantry. Seasonally, it just 'feels right' and at least in the U.S. there are lots of holiday sales on food you can take advantage of.

Regardless of the season, whether you’re concerned about preparing for a natural disaster or economic hard times, or just tired of opening your cupboards and not having a variety of tasty, nutritious items to choose from, it’s always a good idea to get in the habit of stocking and maintaining one’s pantry. Here are some tips to help: Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry

How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening

The Sharing Gardens is based on the concept of mutual generosity; building relationships through the sharing of time and resources. One of the ways we demonstrate this is through our process of building fertility in our soils.

Since 2020 we have grown all our food "veganically" and without the use of commercial fertilizers. This means we use no livestock manures (cow, chicken, sheep etc) and no animal by-products (blood or bone meal etc) or any products mined or shipped from distant lands (gypsum, bat guano etc.). Being vegetarian, and committed to deriving our food from local sources whenever possible, this way of growing food just makes sense to us!

Most of our garden's fertility comes from leaves...

Our system is simple: the majority of our soil's fertility comes from leaves and grass which we compost in large wooden bins or in the paths of our greenhouses. 

...and grass clippings.

The challenge is in gathering enough materials. Here's where the mutual generosity comes in! We provide a drop-off site for our neighbors and yard-maintenance companies to bring their leaves and grass. This means they don't have to pay to have these valuable materials hauled away in trash cans, or deposited at the closest municipal-scale composting site (25 miles away). We receive these materials in abundance and are able to extensively mulch and compost our garden beds, create our own potting mix and have enough compost to share with the volunteers in our gardens who have small gardens of their own.

Besides composting yard waste in large wooden bins, we spread it in layers in the paths of our greenhouses which turns to compost beneath our feet. Donn: spreading grass clippings in the SunShip greenhouse.

Compost is scooped up from the paths in the autumn, sifted and bagged for use throughout the coming season.

Craig, sifting compost.

When people drop off their yard waste in plastic lawn/leaf bags, we hang them to dry on clotheslines in our greenhouses. Once dry, we roll them into bunches of 5-6 bags, twist-tie them together and put them in a covered barrel at the drop-off site for our neighbors to take for free and use for future loads. This helps reduce our community's use of plastic.

Llyn, folding leaf bags for re-use.

We place a sandwich-board sign out on the street, inviting neighbors to bring us their  leaves and grass. Touching up the paint is a winter task...

Barrel on the left holds free bags that have been dried and rolled in bundles for people to re-use. We ask people to leave the bags untied and to turn them upside-down to prevent rain from getting in.

To read a detailed post about our veganic soil-making methods, CLICK HERE.

A small percentage of our soil  fertility also comes from coffee grounds collected from coffee shops by friends of the Gardens and wood ash (left), a by-product of how we heat our home. Here is a LINK explaining the benefits of these free resources.

We're so very grateful to all our neighbors who have participated in this program this year.

 

Crumb-Free, Whole-Grain Cornbread Recipe

Yummm!

Here is a recipe I developed over the years for a delicious, whole-grain corn-bread mix. I make it in bulk, pre-mixing all the dry ingredients so, if we want a loaf for breakfast or guests, or potlucks, it's a simple matter of adding the wet ingredients and popping it in the oven.

For best results, use all 'organic' ingredients. Most corn grown in the United States that is not-organic, is GM (genetically modified) and both corn and wheat, even if not GM is often grown with heavy pesticide use. "Organically grown" means: good for your health; good for the health of the planet!

We grow our own blue-corn for meal.

Corn Bread Mix (makes enough for about 13 loaves).

In a large bowl, measure and mix thoroughly:

3 cups All Purpose Flour
2.5 cups Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
2 cups Corn Flour
3/4 cup Yellow Corn Meal
3/4 cup Blue Corn Meal

Mix all the flours and meals together thoroughly. I like to use my hands!

In a smaller bowl, measure and mix thoroughly:

2.5 cups Brown Sugar
3/4 cup Coconut Flour
1/2 cup Baking Powder
2.5 teaspoons Salt
1.5 cups Ground-Seed Mix (1/3 cup Poppy seeds, 1/3 cup Chia seeds, 2/3 cups (and a bit) of Flax seeds - See note below.)

Mix  the two bowls of dry ingredients together. Take extra-care to be very thorough in this mixing process, otherwise you may have some loaves that don't have enough baking powder to rise well, or a loaf might be too salty (or not salty enough). Store in an airtight container, in a cool place out of direct sunlight. Corn products are especially susceptible to rancidity.

Recipe uses a 7.5" x 4" mini-bread pan

Recipe for Individual Loaves: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil 7.5 " x 4" mini-bread pan (see picture).

• Measure wet ingredients, whip briskly - thoroughly mixing. For best results, bring wet ingredients to room temperature.
• Add dried fruit/nuts, or savory ingredients (see notes below). Mix well.
• Add bread-mix. Gently fold together so all flours are moistened. Don't over-mix because the baking powder works by creating air-bubbles. Mixing too briskly causes them all to pop, making a flat loaf.
• Let batter stand in bread-pan for five minutes before putting into pre-heated oven so baking powder can begin to rise.
• Bake for 30-35 min. (till top is brown and toothpick inserted comes out dry).

Wet ingredients:
2 eggs
1/3 cup not-milk (soy, almond, oat milk...)
1 tablespoon light oil - we use sunflower or safflower as they don't have strong flavors

Fruits/Nuts etc.
1/4 - 1/2 cup - This recipe is nice because it can be made sweet or savory depending on what meal it's accompanying. Be creative! (See variation-notes below).

Dry mix:
1 cup

Notes-Mix:

Blue Corn Meal: Blue corn meal is higher in protein than yellow corn meal (by as much as 30%). We like to grow and grind our own - LINK.
Coconut Flour: We recently discovered coconut flour and love using it for many purposes: we sprinkle about a tablespoon on our bowls of hot cereal, we use it in pie crusts and sometimes use it to thicken smoothies. Important: if you experiment with substituting it for regular flours, it is highly fibrous so use it in place of an other whole grain at a rate of 3/4:1 (if receipe calls for 1 cup WW flour, use 3/4 cup coconut flour instead).
Baking Powder: Baking powder, especially if exposed to air and moisture will lose its potency over time. So, don't buy more than you can use in 6-9 months and store it in an air-tight container.
Ground seeds: Using a 2-cup measuring cup, fill to 2/3 cup with chia and poppy and then top it off with flax-seeds up to 1.5 cups. Grind the mixture of seeds using an electric coffee-grinder that is dedicated to non-coffee grinding-- or cleaned very well.

Variations-Notes: 

Here are some of our favorite sweet combos:

• Banana/dried date-pieces/walnuts 
• Dried apricot pieces/date pieces/dried lemon peel (soak well in wet ingredients for 30 min.)
• Raisins/sunflower seeds, 

OR savory options:

• chopped red-peppers/green onions/small cubes of cheese. 

Pancakes - thin the batter with a splash of soy-milk, milk or water. Great with homemade apple butter, yogurt and honey or your own favorite topping!

Thin the batter for pancakes and add your favorite toppings.

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