The Season Turns: From Zucchini to Smoke and Fire

September always feels like a crossroads. Days stay warm, but nights drop just enough to make you grab a sweater. The fields are still heavy with late-summer vegetables — zucchini, tomatoes, corn — but apples and grapes are ready too. Squash starts rolling in at the farmstands. It’s the overlap of abundance and transition, and for anyone who cooks close to the land, it’s a season you don’t want to miss.

Cooking the Overlap

This is when I lean into ingredients that would normally get tossed aside. Take zucchini stems, for example. Most people cut them off and pitch them. But if you split the stems, shave them into ribbons, and treat them like pasta, you get something completely different — chewy, vegetal, and honest. Fire does the rest, softening the fibers and giving them smoke. I’ll be sharing a video of this technique because it’s one of those late-season tricks that helps you stretch the harvest and see a familiar crop in a new way.

Cooking in this in-between moment is less about recipes and more about telling the truth of the season. Tomatoes still deserve their time directly on the coals, corn should be blistered until caramelized, but now you start layering in apples cooked down into compotes, or squash kissed by fire and draped in cider vinegar. Summer sweetness collides with autumn gravity — that’s where the magic lives.

Forager’s Pantry: Smoked Grape Jelly

This year we’re also working grapes into something special for The Forager’s Pantry: smoked grape jelly. Grapes in September are abundant and a little unruly — tart, wild, sometimes stubborn. By introducing smoke, we pull them into a deeper register. The jelly lands somewhere between jam and memory: dark, slightly sweet, with a faint campfire note.

It isn’t the kind of jelly you spread on Wonder Bread. This belongs on a charcuterie board with cured meats and cheeses, brushed over roasted duck or pork, or spooned alongside aged cheese where its smokiness can cut through the fat. Grapes themselves are symbolic this time of year — harvest, abundance, celebration. Capturing them in this way feels like bottling September itself.

Full Throttle Wedding Season

Behind the scenes, we’re in the thick of wedding season. September for us means going flat-out. The crew is running on fire, sweat, and adrenaline as we bounce across upstate New York and even into Rhode Island, where we’re preparing for a 350-person wedding. That scale always amazes me — hundreds of people gathering around fire, smoke, and food. It’s as exhausting as it is energizing, and it keeps us sharp.

Looking Ahead: Thanksgiving & Winter Dinners

Even while we’re hauling wood and iron across fields for weddings, I can’t help but look toward what’s next. Thanksgiving pre-orders will be opening soon. For us, Thanksgiving isn’t just another holiday. It’s a chance to craft something meaningful for your table — food that carries the Heirloom Fire spirit into your home. Expect offerings that feel unique, thoughtful, and seasonal, with that same grounding in ritual and fire.

And when the cold really sets in, we’ll be back home in Richmond for our indoor experiential dinners. These are a different kind of fire gathering — tighter, more theatrical, sometimes conspiratorial. Cooking inside, we play with light, shadow, and smoke in ways that feel immersive and transportive. If summer is about expansiveness, winter is about intimacy, and I can’t wait to bring those nights back.

Why the Transition Matters

Cooking seasonally isn’t just about using what’s at hand. It’s about acknowledging the shift. Late September meals remind us that time is moving, that nothing stays in peak form forever, and that’s part of the beauty. Preserving grapes, saving ramp butter from spring, or roasting squash as soon as it arrives — all of it ties you into the rhythm of the land.

Fire is the perfect medium for this because it doesn’t lie. It forces you to pay attention, to slow down, to notice when the light changes or when the air carries that first cold snap. A meal built from fire and the moment becomes more than dinner. It becomes a marker of time — a ritual that grounds you in where you are and what’s passing.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you’ve got zucchini overtaking the garden, don’t toss the stems — turn them into pasta. If you see grapes at the market, grab them and think beyond jelly jars. If you’re craving warmth at night, roast squash over open flame and taste the season tipping toward fall.

And if you want to bring some of this spirit into your own kitchen, keep an eye out for our smoked grape jelly release, our Thanksgiving pre-orders, and the announcement of our Richmond winter dinners.

Closing thought: September is fleeting. Cook outdoors, preserve what you can, lean into both sides of the season. Because by the time you settle into the rhythm, the moment has already moved on.