Tonight is a bit of a schizophrenic night.

It marks the beginning of the October Eat Local Challenge and I wanted to make something as 0 miles as we could get.

So I harvested the first of the ripe paste tomatoes (poly tunnel is the answer!) and combined with them with leeks, bell pepper, thyme, rosemary and oregano from the garden. Add a touch of garlic from the farm down the way and you’ve got a summer pasta sauce that just needs a brief simmer.

Of course, the only pasta in the house is organic, but from somewhere on the other side of the country (pantry stash) and the parmesan was from Italy. Oh well, the most important part of the meal was delicious and 90% homegrown.

Of course it’s also the kind of dish you expect to be eating in the heat of August, not the cool of fall.

At the same time, we needed to pick up the apples from one of our geriatric trees before they all fell on the ground. It’s apparently a transparent apple tree (learned from someone else’s blog but I can’t remember who) and is technically on our neighbor’s property. But since it’s just over the line and he doesn’t seem inclined to harvest them (75% are on the ground) we helped ourselves.

The apples reinforced that fall is here. That really it’s been here for a couple of weeks.

We picked about a half bushel. Then I put them through my handy peeler/slicer and cooked them down into applesauce. And wow, those babies are soft and sweet. They’ve cooked themselves into sauce, no smashing required, and don’t need ANY sugar. Just a touch of cinnamon and into the canner they’ll go. I can’t wait to eat the sauce later this winter and remember laughing with Mike while we picked up and picked apples tonight.