Since sometime in August, my kitchen has been inhabited by an ever changing group of pails. Larry brings the pails in,filled with various offerings from the garden which I am supposed to turn into preserved foods for our winter sustenance. We aren’t out on the prairie and will certainly survive on the offerings found at Price Chopper and Super Wal*Mart, but food we grow and put up ourselves is always more satisfying than the stuff we bought at the store.
I have already run through beans, beets, summer squash, sweet and hot peppers and enough tomatoes to entirely fill a 1967 VW Beetle. Now we are down to winter squash. We’ve been eating them right along and the discovery of a recipe for pumpkin sausage soup, which I modified to use squash, depleted them somewhat more. Anyone who parked their vehicle in our driveway for more that few minutes went away with some squash in there and I have plans to take some to my sister’s next week.
Still, I had a an awful lot of them sitting there, so I decided today that I had to deal with them. Here they are in the sink, waiting their fate. I washed and and peeled [just the Sunshine squash gets peeled – the skin is too thin after it is baked and it all crumbles into the flesh, so I just peel it beforehand] 
and split and seeded and roasted and cooled and scraped and packaged and froze 4 different kinds of winter squash [squashes?] I ended up with 8 quart bags for the freezer and another quart plus that I am going to use tomorrow for squash bread. I was pretty proud of all my efforts. I had saved some fresh ones to take to my sisters and didn’t quite get all the spaghetti squash done, so I was down to 1 5 gallon bucket in the kitchen, a season low. 
Larry came home from work tonight and saw the packages on the counter, having their final cooling before being put in the freezer. He said “Oh great – can I bring in the rest of them?”
REST OF THEM??????
“Yep – I have 3 more pails of them down in the garage.”
*cue sound of me jumping out of high building*
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”
Oh never mind – we live in a one story house!
