...The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the fields And the colors are much brighter now It's like they really want to tell the truth We give our testimony to the end of the summer ...

This beautiful autumn cake makes the house smell so divine while it bakes. You may serve it for breakfast, afternoon tea or for holiday dinner. Ingredients: 2 large Golden Delicious apples Juice of 1/2 lemon 3 eggs 1 1/2 cups sugar, plus more for dusting 8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled 1/2 cup milk 1 tsp. vanilla extract, I use cranberry extract 1 cup cake flour 1 tsp. baking powder 1/8 tsp. salt 1 tsp. grated lemon zest 1/3 cup raisins, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes...

Candied lemon zest makes a lovely garnish for summer desserts. It also makes a damn fine addition to summer cocktails. The key to making candied citrus zest is extracting all of the bitter flavor imparted by the pith (the white, inner part of the peel). Since it's nearly impossible to remove the pith completely, the best way to get the bitter out is blanching the zest three times, by dropping it into boiling water to release the bitterness, then shocking it with ice water to stop the cooking (and repeat, and repeat). Ingredients: 4...

A little history about pumpkins from "the Frugal Gourmet Cooks American" "We received the gift of the yellow gourd from the Indians, of course. When European explorers hit the New World they found the Native Americans eating all kinds of squashes, but pumpkin was a favorite. The white men thought the pumpkin to be a form of giant melon. They were partly right, as the pumpkin belongs to the family Cucurbitaceae, which also includes cucumbers, gherkins, and melons. The wild ancestor of the grate orange vegetable...