Home Dried Pumpkin Crackers

My grandson would eat pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie every day of his life if he had his d’ruthers, so here’s the recipe for the pumpkin crackers I’m making now in my newfound food drying frenzy. From a crop of mini-pumpkins that took over three whole terraces of the garden (I only planted 4!) before I started cutting them back so I could get to the compost bin and tomatoes.

3 cups pumpkin puree
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup ground mixed acorns and pumpkin seeds
* [can add flax and/or sesame seeds as desired, whole, toasted]
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. ground nutmeg

Now, 3 cups of pumpkin puree is about what you get out of a single mini pumpkin. If you’re growing giants, good luck (you can eat pumpkin bread and pie every day for a year from just one of those). Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds into a colander, quarter and put into an oven roasting pan with about an inch of water. Bake at 350º until soft. While the oven’s on, roast the cleaned and rinsed seeds on a baking sheet, stirring every 5 minutes to roast evenly (don’t burn). The pumpkin will be done in about 30-40 minutes.

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Late Fall Fruit: Persimmons!

The fruit crops were abundant this year due to lack of a hard late freeze as well as due to a killing late freeze last year that killed off the apple, pear and cherry crops altogether and reduced the grape harvest by at least half. The trees and vines think they’re dying after such a bad year, so will produce like crazy the next year. Yet oddly enough, there are no acorns or hickory nuts or wild walnuts on the homestead this year. Either they’re all getting eaten as fast as they fall by deer, or there just aren’t any. So again this year I’ll have to gather my acorns a bit south at my sister’s place on the lake.

Cherries are the first to ripen in early June. My family eagerly looks forward to them and I’ve never had to try and preserve – they get eaten just as fast as I can gather. Then comes the apples in August. This year the golden delicious were fat and happy, enough to turn into pie and apple butter in addition to being eaten regularly fresh off the tree. The pears fall in September and there were plenty this year to process. These are hard cinnamon pears, not great to eat straight because they’re so tough even after sitting for a few days, so I make pear butter that needs very little sugar and is great on toast or mixed into hot oatmeal or cream of wheat.

The grape harvest starts with concords in early September and then muscodines later in the month. With those, I thought the fruit harvest was done for the year when I happened to discover now in mid-October a lone American persimmon tree [Diospyros virginiana] in the back corner of the yard behind the shed that is absolutely loaded. We’ve lived here 16 years and I never saw fruit on this 40-foot tall tree, so I guess it must have reacted to last year’s late freeze just like the other fruit trees did. Hmmm… what to do with persimmons?

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Spring Tonics Present Themselves

Vitamin-Packed Goodies are Popping Out All Over!

I’m sure most people as as glad as I am that “Standard Time” was shortened significantly this year, having never quite made the adjustment to early darkness in the first place. Springing the clock forward early just puts us back where we were anyway all the dark winter long. Easter’s early this year too, and as my mother used to say, you can’t be sure it’s really spring until Easter.

Of course, last year we suffered a hard Easter freeze in mid-April that ruined the fruit and mast crops irreparably – even fooled the dogwoods that were in full bloom! So while garden preparations are proceeding apace with the march of March, and potatoes, lettuce and peas have been planted, we’re not ’safe’ to really get things in the ground until late April.

Despite this, the daffodils are in glorious bloom along with forsythia, the crocus have come and gone, the lilies are growing fast and everything’s budding. All I can do is hope the fruit and mast aren’t ruined this year by another late freeze, but there are many things growing right now that a homesteader can make good use of just because it’s there. All of these goodies are packed with vitamins and serve to help prep the system after a long, slim, dark winter.

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Edible Wild Things: “Cossack Asparagus”

The Common Cattail (Typha latifolia), a.k.a. the broadleaf cattail, and its cousins the narrowleaf cattail, southern cattail and blue cattail, grow throughout North America and much of the rest of the world. They like to grow in shallow water-catchments off the side of roads, at the low end of agricultural fields, near ponds, lakes and swamps. Most people are very familiar with stands of cattails in their area, but may not have thought much about how useful this plant is as food and medicine.

Almost all parts of the plant are edible at the right time of year. As a member of the grass family (as are wheat, rice, corn, oats, barley and rye) that has thus far escaped concentrated cultivation, the homesteader might develop as much a liking for cattail foods as for other wild foods such as acorns, sun chokes, ground nuts and kudzu. Particularly if s/he has a nice natural stand of cattail in the bottomland marsh, where it’s easy to harvest edible parts at all times of year. In fact, management by harvesting can contribute to the general robustness of a fine stand of cattails and increase yields.

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