Anyone who knows me really well knows that I am often powered by guilt, honest, but sometimes inexplicable and often self-gratifying guilt. My guilt these last few weeks – letting food go to waste. I try to remember that food in my garden isn’t taking food away from other people, but the thought of squandering pounds of food because there is just too much makes me panic with guilt.

Today, 11 million people could die because of drought and famine in parts of Africa alone – not to mention the millions of hungry people in my state and country. I’m trying to shift from guilt, a relatively useless emotion in terms of action, to mindfulness and gratitude for my land and for my plate. 

I’ve tried finding friends to take stuff, and I even looked for local food banks that might be able to use some of this stuff but their policies didn’t really welcome it.

And so.. here we are. This isn't even everything, these are just all the ones that I could carry in that day. Last year the squash fizzled out early in the season after some hungry animals gobbled up the blossoms... so we may have over compensated slightly this year.

Combined with guilt is the “You might need this one day”- Depression Era hoarding gene I inherited from my grandfather. When we cleaned out his cabinets after he died, we found dozens of boxes of Ziplock bags and sugar. While some people hoard things that are not useful – dirty blankets, used up chapstick containers, cats – the gene I inherited says stuff like “Do NOT throw away 50lbs of squash because you can’t use it today, because in a few months you might need some squash,” in the same way that my grandfather couldn’t pass up a deal on Ziplock bags and sugar because some day he might need them.

So, I’ve made squash in some way or another for every meal, chopped squash to use later in the week to keep in the refrigerator and even made a squash curry soup to freeze for later. And I still have squash everywhere.

Oh look! More squash!

After doing Google “research,” I realized that squash could be frozen. It isn’t complicated, but it involves a step I’d never thought about. If you have extra squash you want to save, 1) Wash and chop them to the size you want, 2) boil them for 3 minutes, then quickly remove the squash from the hot water and 3) put them into a bowl of ice water. This is called blanching, something I’m sure everyone but me knew about before now. Blanching the squash stops the enzyme that normally causes decay so when you freeze them they will maintain their color and texture.

After squash, I tackled my next nearly useless bumper crop..hot hot hot peppers.

But, after the "I just sliced peppers before putting in my contacts and I feel like someone just maced me"-debacle of a few weeks ago... I wore protection this time.

I’ve frozen peppers without blanching before with success, so for these I just washed, deseeded and chopped them before bagging.

I still have no idea what to do with these. There is enough hotness in this bag that I thought about pureeing it, putting it in a water gun and using it as pepper spray. But seriously, you could feel the heat in the air in the kitchen as I was cutting them.

Just as I was beginning to get the squash/pepper situation under control, I went outside to see that a storm had blown over a pear tree. I picked some of the fruit before it could go bad.

A bucket of pears. And also the rain boots that I wear in the garden. Because that's just how I do things.

From these, I made our whole house smell like Christmas by making first a batch of Asian Pear preserves (we have several trees of Asian Pears that were ready to be picked) by cooking down cubed, peeled pears, sugar, lemon, ginger and a little cinnamon. Next I took another 20ish pears, peeled and finely chopped them and cooked them down with cinnamon, sugar, cloves and ginger to make pear butter. I don’t have a recipe for any of those because I just used the “little of this and a little of that” method, and cooked them until they were the right consistency. Because I’m still terrified of actually canning, these have to be refrigerated and consumed in a reasonable amount of time.

I kind of love glass jars.

In other garden news… the bell peppers are finally starting to turn sweet, we have one little watermelon hanging on for dear life in the 100* weather, the tomatoes are pretty much finished, a dozen butternut squash (probably my favorite food) are starting to turn, and yesterday I picked one single fig off our some forgotten fig bushes. Heaven for me.

Peppers, peppers, more peppers.

At the risk of you thinking my extended blog absence has been spent entirely in the garden and in the kitchen.. I actually just got back from a few days at the beach with these wackadoos:

That's my happy face.

Any ideas for how to use hot peppers? Or squash? Or basil? Or pears? I’m open to suggestion!