In My Kitchen, September 2022

My one new kitchen tool in September.

Kitchen Challenge

Most kitchen posts are about cooking, baking, and acquiring new foods and cooking devices. Today I’m going to start with something completely different: fighting stuff that gets tracked in through the kitchen door. Everyone has to keep the floor clean, but nobody talks about it! September starts the season here when trees are constantly dropping little seeds and things… October and November the trees are dropping leaves… then there will be slush and snow. 

On the ground outside my kitchen for most of the month:
Hundreds of maple twirlers

Everywhere on the tile floor: maple twirlers.

What to do?

Most of you probably have a mini-vac just like I do.
Mine is hanging beside the flour canisters in the pantry.

Fall Produce in the Kitchen

As the leaves get ready to drop, September is also approaching the end of the growing season for many great fruits and vegetables in Michigan, like peaches, plums, apricots, lettuce, bell peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes. Happily, the season for apples and pears is just starting. And onions and potatoes last through the winter.

First frost date for the lower 48 states. Alaska has frosts virtually all year.
Hawaii has frosts only at high elevations. (Source)

By the end of September, the first frost here in southeastern Michigan is not far off — if it hasn’t happened already. The current forecast gives us another two weeks before it happens this year. Fresh produce is a big deal for many of us, but much depends on the weather; above is a map showing what we could expect. In my experience the frost is often a bit earlier than the map indicates, though I guess that the warming of the planet is giving us a few more days of ripening tomatoes. 

Some of the last local orange and red tomatoes, peaches, and plums… and an early apple.
I think the ripening tree fruit is more related to the length of the day, and yes, days are getting shorter.
My fresh produce comes from two stores that sell local produce: The Produce Station, a retail market,
and Argus Farm Stop, a farmers’ consignment market.

I did not freeze or otherwise save any fall produce this year,
except for this one little bag of plums, frozen for a plum cake next winter.

From Argus Farm Stop: fantastic local corn. I always husk corn outdoors.

Very fresh large duck eggs, raised by Webbed Foot Pines and sold by Argus.

You can see how fresh the eggs are by the way the yolks
stay very spherical and don’t flatten out.

Baking

I baked a white pizza.

Len baked croissants, which I documented in an earlier post.

 New book, published this month: Ken Forkish,
Evolutions in Bread

The new book features breads made with
early strains of wheat, like eincorn.

A gluten-free challah that Len made for our neighbor, using a recipe from the web.

Coming soon…

Halloween candy is everywhere, and I’ve had some already.

One by one, leaves begin to color and to drop.

I’m sharing my September kitchen summary with the blog event “In My Kitchen” hosted by Sherry at her blog Sherry’s Pickings (sherryspickings.blogspot.com). This post © 2022 by mae sander.