Backyard Harvest

With a very warm July and early August, our backyard is bursting with fruit. Yesterday was the first cooler day with a little bit of rain and so I decided to devote myself to dealing with some of this.

Those are yellow plums, figs, and apples from our yard and a zucchini from our neighbours’. Last year, the apples were ready until the end of August/beginning of September. This year they’re already falling from the branches and piling up in our grass. Aside from hating to see food go to waste, it attracts animals. Like bears. And Canadian Geese who then poop all over our driveway.

This is half of our harvest from blackberry picking nearby on Sunday afternoon.

Half of the zucchini went into a Double Chocolate Zucchini loaf. A quarter got shredded up into the freezer and the rest was Zucchini Sticks before dinner.

The figs posed a larger problem. Last summer, we were overseas when they ripened so this was my first time ever dealing with fresh figs. The most common recommendation I heard was fig jam but I had neither the supplies nor the heartfelt desire to spend my day making jam.

Italian Fig Cookies were my answer.

They were better than I hoped – the figs made them light and moist and a dash of cloves made them taste like Christmas.

A bowlful of apples and the best $3 I ever spent at a thrift store.

Once the apples were cored, peeled, and diced, they could go in the freezer. That is, the ones that didn’t make it into an Apple-Blackberry Crumble.

I’ll probably be able to pick another bowl of apples next week.

The plums are excellent on their own but there are SO many of them! I’m not sure about how well plums freeze so we’ve been trying to eat them/give them away. Again, a common suggestion was jam and again, I’m only so domestic. My first foray with the plums was a German-style Plum Cake. Yesterday, I used them to make an Asian-style Plum Sauce. A little sour but a decent supplement to last night’s dumplings for dinner.

There’s still a lot of fruit out there but it was extremely satisfying to make use of a lot of it.

And, in unrelated news:

Peter and I woke early one morning a couple of weeks ago and watched this guy at the shore in front of our house, digging for his breakfast. There’s food everywhere.