As summer comes to an end in the southern hemisphere, and fall begins to slowly creep in with it's rains and lower temperatures, we experience one of the most abundant times of year as many crops are ready for harvest and mushrooms begin popping up with more and more frequency.
These wonderful field mushrooms are in bloom, and every day and we take a time to harvest. We take advantage of it in our meals, and soon we think about dehydrating.
We add some mixture of leaves, legumes and tubers to all our soups. The last one was green peas, plus the ingredients you see above. When the peas and broccoli look more or less ready, we add quinoa and the leaves along with the carrot. We love our soups, especially on these cold days.
One of the ways we use shrooms are in vegetable soups along with other things we harvest from our garden:
Those carrots are not premature, rather they are a small variety. Then some broccoli, curly docks (wild edible), swiss chard, beet leaves, kale, and chopped carrot leaves (amazing how much food is available if we use the whole plants).
We add some mixture of leaves, legumes and tubers to all our soups (when available in the garden). The last one was green peas, plus the ingredients you see above. When the peas and broccoli look more or less ready, we add quinoa and the leaves along with the carrot.
We love our soups, especially on these cold days.
We also enjoy plenty of potatoes both from our garden and, in the case of the picture, from @fenngen 's mother's garden too. She has gathered a nice diversity of species along the years as you can see.
It's also time to eat a lot of zucchini from choli 's family's greenhouse. We're not just taking from there, as @choli often does work there and takes the time to manually pollinate the flowers.
We chop potatoes and zucchini, add some spices and flour before putting them in the oven to get a really nice toasty/fried texture.
And let's not forget our foraged mushrooms in the mix.
Voila:
Food is served!
Then come the cherries which we have eaten plenty directly from the trees but also have gathered to store in two different formats: jam that was prepared both @choli 's and @fenngen 's mothers, and some macerated in schnapps by us, which will serve us well on cold winter days.
Here @fenngen passes the cherries from the funnel used to transfer the juice in the jars to the bottle with schnapps. These cherries were previously left to ferment with sugar in the jars. The recommended time is 15 days but these were left longer without presenting problems.
Once the "enguindado" (Chilean name for this drink) is bottled, it is convenient to rest for a month so that the cherries continue releasing their juices and the flavors are better felt. We hope you have cherries to try this delicious drink.
We also count with a couple varieties of prunes, tons of apples, and rosehips.
There is much more we can enjoy during this time but we'll leave it here to not make this post too long. We hope you've enjoyed this post, please tell us in the comments what kind of things you enjoy in the transition from summer to fall, every place has its own ways of abundance so it's always interesting to share. Thanks for joining us, we wish you a great weekend.