Stuff it, August!

The August chapter in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) is pretty thick, but not quite as thick as the July chapter. It's clear that home gardens are starting to wind down, just as summer does. Fewer new types of fruits and veggies are coming into season in August. There's still a pretty substantial list, though, and this chapter has a lot of recipes for stuffed veggies.

The brand-new heads of cabbage can be turned into stuffed cabbage. You might expect the little rolled-up leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, but this recipe is a little different.

I think the core is kept mostly intact-- just has the leaves spread out and then reassembled once they're stuffed with a sausage-and-chicken-liver mixture before the whole thing is topped with strips of bacon and baked in a mixture of white wine and chicken stock. (I have a hard time mentally picturing this based on the instructions, though, so maybe I'm mistaken?) In any case, this seems a little classier than the usual stuffed cabbage.

If you for some reason love hot cucumbers, there's a stuffed cucumber recipe.

These make use of the tomatoes and onions that should also be in season (and count on the salty, smoky bacon to distract you from the hot cucumber part).

If the onion in the other recipes isn't quite enough to fulfill your need for alliums, there's also a recipe for stuffed onions.

The more of these stuffed veggie recipes I read, the more I suspect they were a stealthy way to get more bacon into the diet (and maybe use up extra bread crumbs and chicken livers). 

If stuffing seems like too much work, though, and you just want to use up a bunch of late summer veggies, then the Colache may be the best choice.

It's an easy way to use up zucchini, onion, corn, green peppers, and tomatoes all in one go-- a helpful way to use up what you've got as the days get shorter and more hectic...