Geez, What Month is This?

It definitely will not last long, but, with the price spike in gasoline around here in California, Kathy and I decided to be good to our wallets and forego any wine jaunts this past weekend. Sonoma, Napa, Livermore, Lodi, Clarksburg: Y’all are just going to have to wait.

At least until this coming Saturday.

But with an e-mail coming in to us last week from Brentwood’s Enos Family Farms announcing that strawberries and heirloom tomatoes were both still on the vine for U-Pick, the timing couldn’t have better for us to stay a bit closer chez nous.

Enos Family has a regular retail booth at the Brentwood Farmers Market every Saturday morning, but the actual farm and farm stand isn’t very far from the market’s downtown location. Enos is an organic concern smack in the middle of what I refer to as “growers’ gulch,” an expansive array of like farm acreage offering seasonal U-Pick and/or harvested fare from the fields.

So, here we are, on a sunny Sunday in the middle of October; it’s 80 degrees at 10:30 a.m. If it weren’t for every other farm sporting signs exclaiming “Pumpkin Patch Now Open!,” Kath and I wouldn’t have a clue that we were a mere two-and-a-half weeks from Halloween.

At the Enos stand, we were directed to the farm rows housing the three Food Groups of produce that we wanted to pick, and we set off, a trio of buckets in hand.

First up was the strawberry patch. Now, check out Kathy’s photo of these mofos. In October! Crazy, Daddy-o. We’ve been enjoying these sweethearts all week, with a bissel Balsamic glaze on top, for dessert.

Next on our proverbial cook’s tour was a trek to the back forty and the tomato plots. It was heartbreaking to see so many gorgeous, albeit extremely mushy or split, specimens on the ground. But we were ultimately able to eke out a nice harvest of assorted ripe varietal organic heirlooms off the vines. We’ve been enjoying them sliced, with a little grey sea salt and a good oil from a particular Livermore olive grove, and in sandwiches. Most notably, Kathy slow-roasted a bunch of them quartered with entire cloves of unpeeled garlic and olive oil for over three hours, in preparation for a soup adapted from Gwyneth Paltrow’s book, “My Father’s Daughter.”

This is also the time of year when, wherever we’ve lived — Seattle, Portland, Cali — and no matter how extended or truncated the growing season, K gets a hankerin’ to go all Laura Ingalls Wilder and put up a batch of pickles.

That’s what the third bucket was for: pickling cukes for refrigerator dills. There were plenty of pickles-to-be for the picking at Enos Family Farms and, after a quick detour to the market for fresh dill weed, Kathy was back in our kitchen working a new recipe for refrigerator dill slices. Ready in just 24 hours, these bad boys are outrageous, bay-bee. The recipe comprises, among other ingredients, cider vinegar, canning salt, pickling spice, garlic, onion and dried, crumbled chipotle peppers!

If this isn’t really October in CoCo County, with strawberries and cucumbers and ripe heirloom tomatoes all overlapping seasonal readiness, then what month is this?

Go ahead, U-Pick one. We-Did.