Mark your calendars for October 5th for Red Wagon Farm’s annual End of Season Harvest Celebration.
It’s always a great time to gather and celebrate the end of the year together.
Every year I make a vegetarian chili using vegetables from our farm. CSA memebers often ask how I make the chili, so this year I remembered to take some photos to document the process.

A little planning is necessary because the vegetables are ripe and plentiful a few weeks before the event so I want to capture the flavor of the season at it’s peak. I have been chopping and freezing all week.
I make 10 gallons of chili every year, that is finish/cooked.
I start with tomato seconds. I have a machine I got off craigslist that removes seeds and peels from tomatoes. Cool huh?

I freeze about 7 gallons of these crushed tomatoes. I will probably only use 5 or 6 gallons, but I want to have extra in case the chili is too thick.
We don’t grow corn at Red Wagon, mostly because other farms do such a great job of growing corn. We do sell it at the farm stand and the corn is at it’s peak right now so I wanted to freeze some for the chili. I froze about 1 1/2 gallons of corn for the chili.

I blanch it and remove the kernels from the cobs and freeze it. I like to put a few bags away for my personal use too. We love to have ‘fresh frozen’ corn on Thanksgiving. The corn is so sweet right now it smelled like cake batter.

Next I diced up some bell peppers and froze those as well. Raw peppers freeze beautifully. I froze about 1/1/2 gallons of bell peppers.

…and a few roasted chili peppers went into the freezer for the chili. I clean these by removing the charred peels and seeds and stems so they are easy to use when I finally make the chili.

I’ll update this post as I add more ingredients and cook the chili. I still need onions, garlic and beans, oh, and I’ll probably roast some winter squash to add in right at the end too. But, those ingredients don’t need to be prepared before hand, or more than a day or two to let the flavors blend. So I’ll be doing the rest closer to the Event.

Hope you all can make it.