Lovely fall treat with fresh apples. I fill my two fridge drawers with apples to use throughout the fall and winter.

Ingredients:

• 1 unbaked pie crust (premade or your own)
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1 cup sour cream
• 5 apples or so, peeled and sliced
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 c brown sugar

Instructions:

• Put the sliced apples on the crust
• In a bowl mix flour, cream, white sugar, and pour on top of the apples
• Bake at 425F for 15 minutes then 350F for 35 minutes
• Sprinkle with brown sugar and melt a few minutes in the oven

Butternut squash keeps a long time on the counter (up to February here). If you want to keep is longer, it can be pressure canned. It can only be safely pressure canned in cubes, not as a purée, because the heat can't penetrate dense purée. I store carrots in sand and apples in the veggie drawer of my fridge. I haven't had much luck with storing onions so I usually chop them and freeze them in portions. So, I usually have everything on hand for this soup during the winter.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 apple, diced
• 1 L jar of butternut squash
• 1 bunch of sage
• 1 onion
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/8 tsp cayenne
• cinnamon and nutmeg 
• 1 small can of coconut milk

Instructions:

• ​Put everything in the instant pot and pressure cook on high for 8 minutes -or- simmer on the stovetop until fruits and veggies are tender
• If you remember, take out the sage (I always forget...)
• Add coconut milk and blend with immersion blender (or traditional blender in batches).

This delicious spicy bread had completely replaced banana bread in our household. I can lots of pumpkin in the fall and we have this all winter long. It's a great dessert and treat. I sometimes make it as bread (I use two bread pans), sometimes in muffin tins, or half and half. Lately I've been leaning more towards muffins because they cook more evenly.

Pumpkin can only be pressure canned safely in cubes, not as puree, because puree would be too dense to ensure sufficient heat penetration. However, after pressure canning, the pumpkin is completely cooked and it purees very easily during the making of this recipe. 

Ingredients:

• 1 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cloves
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 pint to one quart of canned pumpkin. 

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 325F
• Grease two bread pans or muffin trays
• In a bowl combine flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, spices, and whisk.
• In a large bowl beat butter and sugar (ideally with a mixer) until just blended. Add eggs and beat until it's very fluffy. Add in pumpkin and mix. 
• Add flour mixture and mix
• Divide into pans and bake 65-75, use a bread knife to test for doneness inside. 

Good recipe to use up carrots! You can't use canned carrots. Good with fresh carrots or carrots stored in a bin of sand. 

Ingredients:

• 1 cup carrots
• 3/4 cup oil
• 2 eggs
• 1.5 cup flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• cinnamon

Optional frosting:

• 3 ounces of cream cheese
• 1/4 lb butter
• 2 cups icing sugar
• vanilla

Instructions:

• Mix cake ingredients, bake at 350F for 1h
• Cool down
• Mix frosting and frost the cake (optional)

Perfect when green beans are in season. 

Ingredients

• Green beans
• butter or margarine
• garlic
• seasoning of your choice (for example lemon-pepper, lemon-dill, etc and salt

Instructions

• Submerge beans in water, bring to a boil.
• Simmer 3-5 minutes until beans start to soften
• Drain off water, add butter and cook 1-2 minutes 
• Add garlic and cook 1-2 minutes
• Season and serve

Good recipe when you have a lot of carrots! We store our carrots in sand bins and eat this pie as a side dish in the wintertime. The leftovers are good cold as well.

Ingredients:

• 2-3 cups of carrots sliced or diced  (could also use potatoes for part of it)
• 1 tbsp butter or margarine
• 3 tbsp cream or milk
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• salt and pepper
• Precooked pie crust of some kind (I use pillsbury crescent rolls
• Parmesan

Instructions:

• Cook carrots, mash them, add margarine, cream, nutmeg, salt and pepper
• Put it in the pie crust
• Put a bit of parmesan on top
• Bake at 425F for 15 minutes

Stinging nettle soup is a hit at our place. It takes a little bit of time to pick the nettle leaves but the cooking itself is very easy. It is adapted from a recipe on Allrecipes .

For tips on handling stinging nettles, read my blog post about this useful weed.

Ingredients (the quantities are all pretty flexible)

• 20 cups of stinging nettle leaves, somewhat packed
• Rice - about 1/3 cup uncooked or 1 cup leftover cooked. I used basmati rice since that is what we typically have around
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• 1 onion
• salt, pepper, olive oil

Instructions:

• Heat olive oil and cook onion. Set aside.
• Bring salted water to a boil and boil leaves for 5 minutes or so, drain off water.
• Add broth, nettles, and rice if uncooked
• Simmer 15 minutes.
• If the rice was cooked, add it at this point and warm it up. 
• Blend it with an immersion blender. Adjust texture with additional liquid if desired.
• Season with salt and pepper if you like.

This is a great "from the garden" recipe for the end of summer or early fall, when the delicata squash is ready to harvest. You'll need to make sure you used successive planting to ensure you still have fresh cilantro at that time of year - all the other ingredients should be "in season".

Ingredients:

• Tortillas (optional)
  
• 2 delicata squash, halved and sliced into 1/2 inch slices
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Green onion, shallot, or onion.
• Spicy pepper (jalapeno or other) - fresh from the garden or dried from the year before
• lime or lime juice from a bottle
• Cilantro, chopped, to taste

Instructions:

1. Preheat over to 400F
2. In a big bowl mix delicata slices, enough olive oil to coat (3 Tbsp approx), generous amount of salt, dried pepper if using. Mix to coat.
3. Spread in a single layer on a pan, cook for 15 minutes then monitor. Flip it, ideally.
4. In parallel, mix chopped green onion, fresh spicy pepper (if using), lime juice (equivalent of half a lime), pinch of salt. 
5. When the squash is ready, drizzle the mix on it and make wraps with tortillas (optional - squash slices can be eaten on their own).