Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz

After a weekend with the grandkids, I arrived home yesterday to find my kitchen and dining room overflowing with produce from the fall harvest. I don't even like spaghetti squash but they're stacked on the dining table alongside a pile of fragrant pawpaws that seems undiminished by the dozens I took north with me. The kitchen counters are covered with tomatoes of many sizes and colors while the fridge is full of okra, habaneros, and red bell peppers. The resident gardener wonders whether I can throw together a batch of stuffed peppers sometime this week, but stuffed peppers are not so much thrown together as painstakingly assembled over a series of hours. So maybe--but not today.

On Friday before I left my husband put a great pumpkin into the back of my car, a pumpkin so big he had to use the tractor to carry it up from the garden, and then he wedged it in with pillows to make sure it didn't roll around. All well and good, but I wasn't able to take the tractor with me to the grandkids' house and I certainly wasn't planning to try to pick up that pumpkin myself. It took a group effort and a garden cart to move the orange behemoth. 

It's been a bizarre garden year: many early crops did nothing--we had very few zucchinis or broccoli and a handful of beans--but later crops are going bananas. I hope we can find someone interested in spaghetti squash because I certainly don't intend to cook all eight million of them. I've been bringing containers of tiny tomatoes to campus to share with colleagues, but I'm not hauling in a giant pumpkin. And all those habanero peppers? If my husband eats them all, we'll never be able to kiss again. 

But I'm not complaining. As long as we have sweet corn in the freezer and fresh tomatoes boiling down into paste in the kitchen, I'm ready for a tasty winter.