Knit is a Four-Letter Word

Today was a beautiful day, one of the lovely fall days with a bit of that later than Summer sun, and a bit of a warm with undertones of cool breeze.

Yesterday was the last family outdoor thing for this year, next weekend is the last CSA Farm share pickup. Back to supermarket vegetables for a while, sigh.

I have a couple of eggplants left, and plan to make this recipe but first needed to make some oven dried tomatoes (scroll down to the end of that Eggplant recipe).

Our Farm Share is a medium sized bucket – usually a bit more than we can eat, but we don’t drop back down to the mini sized basket because of the tomatoes. Every year, the tomatoes are wonderful, and we fill the base of our basket with several layers of organic heirlooms – green zebra, red zebra, brandywine, roma, cherry, pear, pineapple, peach, plum, and red and yellow.

Yesterday’s house smell of chilli has been replaced with roasted tomatoes and capsicum.

Other seasonal traditions are happening – Jeff and I went to our favourite local icecream place, the Custard Corral. During the summer, they’re open until 10PM, now they’re winding down and closing at 9PM. Their last event will be something Halloweeny around the end of this month, and then they’re done until March or April of 2010, weather depending.

Our traditional icecream is a small cone, chocolate and vanilla twist. We had an old person moment, when we compared the price of icecream over my 12 years in the US. When I first got here, for two of those same small chocolate and vanilla twist icecream cones, we’d have had change from $US3.00, and tonight it was $4.07, with the tax. Not a complaint, just an observation.

The icecream quality has not changed, despite a change in ownership. The new owners own another rival, across town icecream place, but smartly changed not a thing about the Custard Corral. They understand, in Millville, everyone has *their* icecream place, messing with that would be business suicide. From my informal survey, it’s mostly geographic – people like and go to the icecream place closest to where they live, with the added wrinkle of going to place nearest to where they first lived, and continuing that patronage, despite moving into a different part of town.

The Custard Corral is my icecream place, it’s the first place I went to in my first visit (1997) to the US. I will buy the banana soft serve from Blinker’s Custard (the other side of town) because it’s made with real bananas, and I will buy the strawberry/banana twist from Flipper Custard because it is very good, but in both cases, it’s a speciality that only they carry. My small chocolate vanilla twist cone is Strictly Custard Corral.

Another marking of the season – we closed some windows in our house. I love the cool nights, and also love the cross breezes our house manages in the Summer. I’m not as keen on the cross breezes going through the bathroom in the morning – makes the morning ablutions a little more Spartan than I’d like. It’s early autumn, so the windows will be opened again, for that brief warm weather blast that lulls me into thinking for a moment that the cold is done.

We like to acclimatize to the weather. First tuurning off the ceiling fans, and then closing the windows. Then wearing more clothes around the house, more blankets on the bed. As late as we can push it, usually after at least one hard frost, then we eventually succumb and put the central heating on. It’s a nice setup with the timer Jeff installed a few years back – cool during the week days when we’re not in the house (Mon-Thur) other than a quick lunch, warmer for our at home evening and morning hours. Back down to cool (55F/13C) overnight, around 11PM on weeknights, later on the weekends.

No time this weekend for a favourite season ritual – to Sunny Slope farm for their apple cider. It’s really good, some of the best cider I’ve ever had. They wait until the middle of October, until they have a good blend of apples, including our favourites, Winesaps. It’s very tasty, cold out of the fridge, or warmed through. Not to mention all of the apples they sell – we don’t buy apples the rest of the year because we’re spoiled by the best seasonal apples in the autumn.

Driving around after dark, the sound of crickets blanketed all other sounds. Another signal that Autumn is now in full swing. The peeps are long gone, not to be heard again until the Spring.