Speaking of potatoes...

Here is a pic of some of the potatoes we grew this year in our garden. Mostly gourmet and fingerling types, although there are some "blue" mashers in there, too.

Okay, we live in Idaho, so why in the world are we growing potatoes? Well, for flavor, mostly. What they tend to grow here are the big old Russet bakers that you get in the restaurant. And while those are nice (and even nicer when you get them fresh from the fields!) sometimes you just want a nice, tender, moist biteful on the end of your fork, smothered with chives and sour cream, and steaming hot from the oven or pot. MMMMMMmmmmmm! And nothing is better than tiny taters fresh from the garden.

We also harvested some beets - and every single one of them is now sitting in a dark red, sweet-tart ginger-honey flavored brine in the fridge, making pickled beets. And the elderberries we harvested from our own shrubs in the back were joined by about 8 - 10 pounds of wildpicked berries we gathered this weekend. All of that has been steam juiced and cooled, and some of it is now put up in amber glass bottles of elderberry cordial for the winter flu season. The rest will be made into elderberry syrup for pancakes and elderberry jelly for toast. If I have enough left, I might put on a gallon jug of elderberry wine to ferment. Maybe that will finally get me to finish that cherry wine I wanted to make this summer, which has been sitting as juice in the fridge for a while now.