Sadly, the gardening season has come to an end. Maybe not for the root veggies, but definitely for my tomato and squash plants. I didn’t realize we’d had a hard frost until the other day when I looked out back and all of the squash vine leaves, usually the size of dinner plates following the sun, were crumpled and brown. Ditto for the tomato foliage. Time to pick it all!

I found a few lovely ripe maters. But many many many greens.

Looks like everyone is getting green tomato chutney for Christmas! Sorry, but the pickled green tomatoes won’t happen this year—we have yet to locate the box of canning supplies in the storage unit.

Our sweet neighbors also gifted us a 5-gallon bucket overflowing with turnips! What to do with turnips? Anything you’d do with potatoes, of course! Today I used half the turnip haul to make mashed turnips.

First, trim off the green and clean them up.

Peel.

Cube and boil in salted water until fork tender.

Drain. Rather than mash by hand, I put the very soft turnips in my food processor with minced garlic, salt, and pepper.

When it was pureed, it was about the consistency of apple sauce.

The turnips are still warm at this point. Don’t forget the butter! If you’ve ever made mashed taters (from actual taters, not a box), this should all sound very familiar. But here’s where it gets interesting. Next, cook about a half pound of bacon.

We used our cast iron skillet so that we could next remove the cooked bacon and add in fresh brussels sprouts—one of my fave veggies.

After the sprouts were crisp on the edges, we added the turnip mash to the skillet for reheating. Finally, we crumbled the bacon on top.

Hello, delicious! Who knew turnips were such an amazing vehicle for garlic and bacon? Michelle Obama should rap about that!! Turn-ip for what?

For your culinary pleasure, here’s the recipe from which we took inspiration. Enjoy the fall produce, folks!

Speaking of fall produce, we found a little sprout of green in the worm composting bin earlier this summer. Ben stuck it in the garden, just to see what happened. Turned out, it was a pumpkin!