Out and about on saturday, we were very uninspired by the lunch options that were available. So we went to the supermarket and bought brie, salami, smoked salmon, and avocados, and had a luxury picnic in a little bit of forest on the edge of Kungsbacka. The autumn colours there are beautiful just now.

Today I dug up the first few parsnips.  This monster weighed in at 950 grams.  It will accompany our roast chicken tonight.  Yummy!

Moussaka – replace aubergine slices with zuke slices.  You don’t need to fry them first.

Lasagne – replace pasta sheets with zuke slices.  Makes it a lot like a moussaka    A good choice for low-carb or gluten-free dieters!

Zuke noodles – I read about this on the Stonesoup blog, and we now eat zuke noodles quite often.  Another good one for pasta avoiders.

Grate them – and have them raw in a salad or hidden in a casserole … a la The Cottage Smallholder.

Zucchini chocolate cake – I made this for Linus’s birthday cake and it went down a treat.

Throw them in an omelette or quiche.  I am considering a crazy idea involving replacing quiche pastry with overlapped zuke slices.  It could be genius, or it could be a kitchen catastrophe … watch this space.

Ask Google – search for “zucchini glut” and you’ll find a million other suggestions.

Or, just fry them with bacon.  Because bacon makes things good.

Zukes with bacon

This is our biggest stainless steel pot, and it gets used a lot for jam making. I overloaded it tonight, with a huge batch of aronia jam, and ended up with a thick burnt later on the bottom. Boo!

My dear husband said he could taste no burntness in the little taster I gave him. I think it tastes very obvious, but I will taste again tomorrow in the cold light of day. Hopefully it is still edible, because there was 12 jars in this batch!

We like to add boiled potatoes to a standard greek salad, to make it more of a meal. This one has homegrown potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and oregano. Shame we have to buy the olives and the feta – we really need some goats!

Just one thing you can do with a create of free apples

Lovely fresh apples, picked from our friends’ tree this afternoon. The best ones will go in the fruit bowl, some will be made into puree & frozen, and some will wait for linus to build his cider press.

This is my first year growing zucchini, and I have to ask myself why I waited so long. We have 4 plants, one of which lives in a pot and one of which was the runt of the litter. These two are only mildly productive, but it doesn’t matter much since the other two are keeping us well fed.

So far we’ve harvested over 4kg of zukes and they don’t look like they’re slowing down. This monster alone weighed 1.2kg. I had left it to get big so I could have big slices for a moussaka. As it turned out, I only used a third of it for the moussaka! Which was delicious, if I may say so myself.

First, you need a lumberjack.

Lumberjack lurks beneath the cherry tree

Then it’s just a matter of …

Down ...

... she ...

... goes!

Then you send in the pickers.

Lumberjack of all trades

Little picker

It’s a bit of a shame to lose the largest of our cherry trees. But the lowest branches were so high, it was impossible to get any fruit from it, so only the birds were getting any benefit.

To answer Kathleen’s comment:

“and then did you pit them all?!”

we pitted a lot of them, by a variety of methods.  Some were cooked and then mushed through a grid (for jam), some were cooked for wine making, some were pitted by hand and made into pies.   We have thirtysomething jars of jam downstairs, some dried cherries going into our muesli, some fruit leather, some cordial, and some cherry wine that is getting very promising.