Cool, autumn days

It is officially autumn in Minnesota. The trees are becoming canvases of golden yellow, brilliant orange and fiery red. The crisp mornings give way to the warm afternoon sun and fall-scented breezes. Delightful. Marco and I have been brewing tea and making salsa over the last week. We feared that central Minnesota would dip into freezing temperatures a few weeks ago. In order to salvage our pepper garden we hastily pulled up all 400 of our plants, piled them into our trailer and tucked them into our garage to avoid the frost. Needless to say, it was only until last night that we got a frost. However, it was great that we quickly harvested our peppers. We've been spending our evenings sorting through all the plants we uprooted - putting the jalapenos in one bin, the bell peppers in another, and so on and so forth.
Over the past week Marco and I have been canning homemade salsa. It's a lot of work and makes the house smell like tomatoes. But oh my! the salsa is delicious. We've been using every kind of pepper we grow and our ripe tomatoes. We also put in garlic, onions, canning salt, vinegar, sugar and cumin. The whole process takes 4 or 5 hours! It starts with cleaning the fruit and cutting it up. Then boiling the salsa to a good consistency and adding the other ingredients. Then sterilizing the jars and lids, pouring the salsa in the jars and putting them in a vat of boiling water for 15 minutes. But Marco and I have the process down and we've prepared about 24 jars of salsa. That doesn't even begin to put a niche into all the peppers we have still waiting for us in the garage.
We'll be picking our apples and pumpkins soon. The apples and pumpkins will be the base to our organic holiday pies. Send us an email if you'd like to order any pies for the holiday time. I love baking and if cakes or cookies are more your delight...I can whip up any tasty treat for your family and friends. While Marco was making a batch of salsa the other day, I decided to prepare some homemade cinnamon rolls. I use a family recipe for the roll dough. It's called the "6 hour bun" recipe. It does take 6 hours to prepare these rolls....but my oh my! it's worth the work. The actual ingredient mixing isn't intense - it's just that the rolls have to rise for 6 hours! Not 6 hours in a row, but there are steps involved in preparing the dough, and after each step they dough must sit and rise for 2 hour increments. But the outcome is sweetly cinnamon scented, delightfully yeasty rolls that melt if your mouth. I usually frost the rolls with a vanilla frosting while they're still warm. That way, the frosting melts into the crevices of the rolls making them even more gooey and delicious. Mmmm, talking about them makes me hungry. :)
I love anticipating the upcoming holiday season. Since autumn is officially here, last week I took out my harvest cookie cutters: a pumpkin, a maple leaf and a turkey. Marco and I made cut-out cookies and decorated them with colorful frosting. Needless to say, they disappeared within a few days. I used the same cookie recipe that was a Christmas tradition when I was a kid. It brought back a lot of great memories of frosting cookies with my sister and brother. My mom would prepare everything and let us make the mess. In hindsight, I wish I had been a more conscientious daughter and helped clean up the mess. But a 12 year-old is more concerned with how many cookies she can eat before getting sick to think about what dishes need to be washed.
Well, here was yet another journal entry without pictures. But fear not! Soon I shall upload some.
Until next time!