What I Eat In A Day – Autumn Harvest Edition

Welcome back for another “What I Eat In A Day” post! Our garden, lovingly tended all spring and summer by my green thumbed husband, is absolutely overflowing with bounty right now! We have hundreds of tomatoes, zucchinis the length of my torso, beautiful peppers and eggplants, sunflowers taller than most basketball players, and a plethora of squash! To be honest, it’s a little overwhelming figuring out how to process it all but at least I know we won’t be running out of pizza sauce this year! Here is an example of some of the meals we are eating as summer turns to fall.

Breakfast

We always have pancakes on Sunday mornings and this week was no different. However instead of our usually blueberry or banana peanut butter, we topped our cakes with homemade cinnamon applesauce! Lincoln and I just finished our first two week preschool unit about apples and the last activity on the list was to use our (more than slightly bruised and scuffed up by this time) apples in a recipe. Surprisingly he chose applesauce instead of pie, so we peeled and chopped a bunch of apples and threw them in the slow cooker overnight with some lemon juice and cinnamon and woke up to the yummiest warm, spicy, perfect for fall pancake topping! We had them with some Applegate Naturals breakfast sausages and of course, coffee for the big people.

Lunch

This was a leftover from a couple of nights previous. We have a TON of buttercup squashes to eat so I decided to roast and stuff a few. Buttercup squashes, if you haven’t tried them, are very similar in appearance to a Kabocha squash but they are much drier (think russet potato) and more mildly flavored. We really like them for mashes but hadn’t tried them stuffed yet and I’m happy to report they turned out well! I stuffed the squashes with a pilaf of quinoa, mushrooms, kale from the garden, dried cranberries, sprouted pumpkin seeds, garlic, and a splash of apple cider vinegar. This makes a super pretty presentation for the first meal but the photo shows the leftovers where we had scooped all the remaining squash meat out and just mixed it in with the quinoa for easier reheating.

Dinner

Now for my most looked forward to meal of the autumn season, butternut squash soup! I look forward to it so much in fact, that I may have gone slightly overboard this year and roasted up eleven baby butternuts and tried to make that into one batch of soup. Even my enormous stock pot was not big enough to hold it all and my kitchen was a bit of a disaster but I persevered! We had huge bowls of the rich, velvety soup for dinner with some warm sourdough bread and lots of butter. We had the same for lunch the next day and will probably eat off of this twice more this week before freezing the remainder.

Dessert

I have some kind of sweet treat after the kids are in bed probably ninety five percent of the time. Sometimes it’s a fancy homemade baked good but most times it looks something like this. My favorite chocolates of the moment are these Eating Evolved Coconut Butter Cups (the mint ones are extra delish!) and I always end my night with a big mug of herbal tea.

I know I’m not the only one who really looks forward to the autumn produce. If you know any tried and true must have fall recipes, please share them below!