The last of the famer's market and harvest

It's the end of October and there won't be a farmer's market after next week.  Because we're both unavailable to go next week, this was our last trip until next year.  It was kind of a bittersweet thing, because we're glad to see the seasons change but also saddened to see the summer end.  When we arrived, the small farmer's market of about 20 vendors was reduced to 2 vendors.  Jaimie questioned whether we should just leave because we noticed a lot of pumpkins, which we had from our garden already, but there were no other people there and I felt that it was our last attempt to support the local fresh food economy for awhile.  It was too much to hope that there would be tomatoes for sale. However, there was much more than we expected.  We got quite a haul, especially because the vendors wanted to sell as much as possible as we were the only ones there and it was about 45 minutes until the end of the market with a lot of food left for sale.  There were some good deals that we had to pass up - like the huge box of peppers for $15, but we didn't want to be processing or freezing all of that, especially considering I'm not fond of cooked peppers.  

We did get two kind of peppers though: Hungarian hot peppers and banana peppers, both for pickling.  Yesterday, we had out a jar of sweet pickles with some Anaheim pepper strips in the jar.  Our toddler requested all of the peppers from the jar, pointing out all the red, and she happily ate them all. 
We figured we could do some jars of just peppers and see how they turn out.  I didn't mind the small taste that I had, so I would be willing to try them despite my aversion to cooked peppers.

Though Jaimie's not fond of sweet potatoes, we did get some.  I like them baked or as sweet potato fries.  Jaimie picked up some shallots for a pasta dish he's excited about.  We also got some turnips because they looked really good.  I'm certain we can mash them with some potatoes in the upcoming menu.  I'm not sure what he wants to do with the cabbage, but he seemed excited about it.  We bought some acorn squash and spaghetti squash.  The vendor gave us a recipe for a spaghetti squash pie that is supposed to taste exactly like coconut cream pie.  That warranted buying another squash.
Here's our haul.

We've pulled out most of the garden long ago, but I did have some saved just because the plants were doing so well and the ones I saved weren't overwhelming to handle.  The Anaheim pepper that we'd overwintered last year was the only pepper plant that produced well at all for us this year.  Unfortunately, I didn't bother to put it in a pot before the last frost, without cover, killed it off.  The frost also killed off the ground cherry plant.  We're planning on making a pie with the ground cherries we have but after husking them we realized that we didn't have enough good ones to do both pie and jelly.  The crab apples are ones that we pulled from the trees by my work.  No one seemed to care that I wanted to take them.  One co-worker said "You sure eat weird things" after he asked why I would even want them.  Well, I wanted them to do the candied crab apples that my sister commented about earlier.  

Jaimie started with the candied crab apples. We're boiling the rest of the crab apples to try a "recipe" for caramel crab apple jelly (recipe is in quotations because it had no measurements and was just kind of a suggestion, which is how we tend to work in the kitchen anyway).

I husked the ground cherries and took all the coriander off the stems (yes, we still had them hung up and hadn't put them in a jar yet). 

We both worked on prepping the peppers for pickling (I left him to do the Hungarians while I did the banana peppers).  Then, maybe tomorrow, we'll work on three types of pesto: cilantro (not seasonal either, but we got it at the Asian market), oregano (from the side of the house), and mint (also from the side of the house).