Final harvest of the year

Last Wednesday night it was due to get quite cold so I decided to pick most of everything that was left in the garden so in the cold drizzle I picked and picked.  Amazingly I didn’t pick everything as there were still dozens of green cherry and grape tomatoes, smaller  (but still good sized) jalapenos, green scotch bonnets and probably 100 pounds plus of spinach which I swear is mutant and grew so well that it took over a huge area of the garden and will probably survive the winter.Over the weekend we quickly ate up the ripe tomatoes and I made some green tomato salsa with some of the smaller tomatoes and that was quite interesting.  Maybe this coming weekend I’ll make one of my favorites, fried green tomatoes, yum! I still need to find a few good recipes to use the bulk of the tomatoes as the salsa and the amount I’ll fry won’t make a dent in all these tomatoes. 

The half sheet pan in the back contains Jimmy Nardello peppers and bell peppers, some of which we have already eaten, some we’ll eat this week and the rest I’ll freeze to use in recipes this winter.  Up front are jalapenos and scotch bonnets.  Over the course of the summer we’ve made and eaten hundreds and hundreds of jalapeno poppers and this past weekend was no different but we kicked it up a notch.  For our final batch of fresh poppers, instead of stuffing them with cream cheese and wrapping with bacon, we instead stuffed the peppers with chevre and shrimp and then wrapped with bacon…wow were they delicious!!  I also made a wonderful roasted jalapeno & garlic soup which Eammon, Anne & Steve thought was outrageous and could be served at any fancy high-end restaurant.  I didn’t take a picture of the soup but it was easy to make and if anyone is interested in the recipe, just drop me an email and I’ll send it.  In the end, over the weekend we managed to eat every last jalapeno in this picture!  A couple of weeks ago I froze and dehydrated a good number of jalapenos and the scotch bonnets, so Anne took all these remaining scotch bonnets and I’m not sure what she’s going to do with them but it should be interesting. 

The garden was fun and we all enjoyed it and loved having all the fresh veggies and fruit all summer.  This being our first year with such a big garden and so much variety, Steve and I learned a lot so hopefully next year it will be even better.