Farmer's Market Saturday: Harvest colors

The rain finally stopped! Thankfully, I can stop building the Ark. Today was a beautiful day, and the farmers brought out more and more of their serious fall produce. Today was all about the colorful, harvest colors of orange, red, brown, and yellow.

This ornamental corn reminds me of New Mexico. We always had lots of lovely multi-colored corn around, and not always as a decoration, either. Think of the distinctive New Mexico blue corn. I'll be sure to share some recipes using blue corn in the winter, along with my mother's famous atole recipe (a hot thick drink made with blue corn).



These colored acorn squash make me dream of oven-roasted tenderness and the sweetness of sugary maple and butter. Soon, I will make a stuffed acorn squash with apples, nuts, and maple syrup. These make a hearty first course to a meal on a cold night.



These little guys are so ugly, they're beautiful! The knobby, bumpy, twisty gourds are the yearly proof of nature's haphazard, random expression of fertility.



And this is the reward we get for enduring the rain this past week! The intrepid mycologist must have been chomping at the bit all week thinking of the gorgeous beauties he would find at the end of the rainstorm. This large maitake is an especially good example of what can grow in secret, dark places in the woods.




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