Harvest Day 2023

Harvest Day 2023. Today I celebrate gratitude for the bounty of the past year.  For garden vegetables, and flowers, for the farmers markets and produce auctions where I procured tomatoes, green beans, and fruit that was canned. In July my mom and I canned 500 pounds of tomatoes including salsa and sauce. I made apple butter, peach jam, and cherry preserves.  This process of putting food up makes me feel connected to the women who came before me. I also acknowledge the bounty of friendships and family, of hard work and play.  I acknowledge grief and sadness and the challenges of the past year. Bounty and generosity comes in any way she wants.

In my family we do not celebrate Thanksgiving. In fact, Thanksgiving is really a day of mourning for the Native people of this land. It is not a nice celebration of pilgrims and Indians getting along. It is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people. It is a reminder of land, language, and culture taken and broken.  It is a time to acknowledge the continued violation of Native people. It is also a time to honor the ancestors and spirituality. Today I gather with family and friends; we celebrate and eat good food together. We know why we do this.  We remember and we create new traditions.

Today on this Harvest Day a bounty has been prepared. I spent time baking pumpkin bread with pepitas chocolate swirl, rye bread, and oatmeal cookies with raisins and butterscotch chips. I remember this from my childhood and hoped to recreate it.  The butterscotch chips are just too sweet for my taste now. I also think I added to many. Less is often best.

I made a warm farro salad with roasted mushrooms, kale, shallots, chopped almonds with a balsamic glaze.  My final recipe for this day is for cranberry relish. My family has been making this nontraditional dish since the 1970’s. 

Ingredients:

1 large navel orange

Cranberries

Walnuts

Dried apricots

Sugar to taste

The amounts of each are left to the individual making the relish.

Traditionally this has been made with an antique meat grinder. Since I don’t have one I rough chop the first 4 ingredients in a food processor 30-60 seconds or so. I transfer the food into a decorative bowl and add the sugar. I use about 3 tablespoons. This cranberry relish is tart and a little bit sweet.

So, we gather at our family farm today in Pike County, Ohio. We cook, we laugh, we watch the Westminster Dog Show. We honor today with a toast. We honor our ancestors by keeping the stories and remembering.