A Sign of Fall

Living in the south as we do, it can be officially Fall but still feel very much like summer.  It is still swelteringly hot and humid, the grass is still growing, mosquitoes still biting and the leaves haven't started falling.  One harbinger of Fall is the ripening (and falling) of the persimmons from our wild persimmon tree in the yard.  The fruit falls from about twenty feet up in the tree to the ground and the soft St. Augustine grass catches it, protecting it (most times) from bursting. 

You can see how tall the tree is, although it is hard to zoom in and see the persimmons up there.

Here is one I zoomed in on.  Their bright orange color is easy to spot and you can gauge how many more will fall.  We go out with a colander every day and pick up what's fallen.  We gather a bunch.  We used to have twice as many as we had two trees, but one of them died.

Unlike normal persimmons, these wild ones are slightly smaller than a golf ball.  Each persimmon has a 'cap' that we pop off and leave on the ground.  We also pinch off a black tip at the bottom of each fruit.  We bring the day's harvest in and wash them up in the sink.

We process them prior to putting them away.  In order to process them, we run them through a full mill.  

By hand cranking the mill, the fruit is broken up and the processed fruit is squeezed through a screen at the bottom.  This leaves only the skin and the large seeds, in the mill while the processed fruit falls into a measuring bowl below.

You can see the screen at the bottom of the food mill and also get a good idea of what the processed fruit looks like.  It is very, very sweet!

We measure the processed persimmons in a big measuring cup.

The reason we meticulously measure the processed fruit is because we make delicious persimmon cakes with them.  The recipe for a persimmon cake calls for 1 1/2 cups of persimmon.  We pour exactly 1 1/2 cups of persimmon into each zip loc bag, using a canning funnel to avoid making such a big mess in the process.

We seal each bag up, label it and stack in the freezer neatly.

We can open the freezer, take inventory of how many bags we have stored up.  Each bag = 1 cake.  It may be my sweet tooth talking, but I see 14 cakes in the freezer.  Nothing like a hot persimmon cake coming out of the oven on a cool, fall day!