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Bountiful harvest

Autumn is, hands-down, my favorite time of year. So many of the things I love about fall have to do with food (mulled cider, pumpkin pie, spiced apples, butternut squash, fried green tomatoes, celeriac—the list goes on and on), and since the Tailor and I eat as seasonally and locally as we can, it’s a darn good thing we live in a state with such abundant produce at hand.

Both T-town and Seattle have incredible open-air markets (hello, Pike Place? I love you.), but my favorite of all is the quietly-unassuming Olympia Farmers Market. Our state capital might not be the hoppin’ tourist hub that downtown Seattle is, but Olympia’s gigantic, spectacular market is one of the best I’ve ever seen, anywhere.

This is the place where you can find around forty different types of Washington apples, and another dozen or so kinds of pears (above are Asian pears, which count as honorary apples in my book).

And there’s plenty of everything else, too. The sheer variety is staggering, and distracting—especially when your mission for the day is to buy just one variety of overwintering apples for your root cellar.

Though I must say, I love seeing the transformation from this:

To this:

Ingredients for a perfect Sunday: crisp sunny weather, countless apple bins to dig through, a handful of friendly Olympians, and a dash of live bluegrass music for spice.

The apples are always a show-stopper, but our biggest goal for the day was something we can’t get at any of the three Tacoma farmers markets:

Fresh cranberries. Olympia is the first stop for cranberries coming in from the coast, and the season is now in full swing. We took home just five pounds this time, but you can bet we’ll be back for more. The Tailor and I have a deep and abiding love for cranberry sauce (it’s great on grits. Don’t look at me like that.), and we kicked off this year’s harvest by finishing off the last jar of our 2008 canning crop.

Homemade cranberry sauce is an incredibly easy thing—so much so that I really don’t understand why so many recipes call for Jello. Cranberries have so much natural pectin in them that with enough sugar they’ll jell on their own. In any event, the Tailor and I believe that cranberry sauce should be a sauce, not a can-shaped cylinder of jelly. So in honor of those little rubies from our rugged coast, here is our favorite recipe:

Cranberry sauce

– 1 lb. fresh cranberries, washed and drained
– 2 c. water
– 1 1/2 c. sugar

Combine the water and sugar and bring to a boil in a small saucepan. Boil for about two minutes on high before stirring in the cranberries. Put the lid on and listen; when the cranberries start popping like crazy and the sauce has begun to foam up, it’s done. This takes less than five minutes. Serve hot or cold (or on grits!).

Note: remember to put that lid on, or you’ll have hot, popping cranberries everywhere!