Even though we've got refrigerators now, putting up food
still makes good sense.
When I arrived to help
my friends Tom and Terri with their garden, they eagerly showed me a 10-pound
zucchini.
“I just wanted to see
how big it would get,” Tom said, explaining why he didn’t pick it when it was
smaller. “Do you want it?”
“I’ll take it,” I
replied, “But are you sure you don’t want it? I can give you recipes.”
Too Much Zucchini
syndrome is well known among gardeners. There’s even an official “Sneak Some
Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch” day — August 8. In Tom’s garden, the
excess isn’t limited to zucchini. There are the runaway cucumber plants that
grow enough to feed a small army, and then there are the tomatoes.
Nowadays, most of us
buy what we need from the store when we need it, so the problem of growing too
much produce is unfamiliar. Those of us who are participating in the resurgence
of gardening are magically transported back to the annual rhythms of an earlier
time.
For us, summer is for
growing food and saving it to be eaten over the winter.
This way, you eat
fresh fruits and veggies when they are at the peak of ripeness, and you can
continue to enjoy them pickled, fermented, dehydrated, canned, or frozen
throughout the year.
I took the plunge and
began canning a few years ago when I found a farmer selling overripe
strawberries for $1 per pint. What a deal! They were too plentiful to eat fresh
before they spoiled, but they were ideal for jam.
And you know what?
There’s no mystery to making jam. The recipe usually involves fruit, sugar,
maybe lemon juice or pectin, and nothing else unless you feel like getting creative.
(This year, I made vanilla cardamom blackberry jam.)
Since my first
jam-making adventure, I’ve often invited friends over to see how it’s done.
They arrive expecting some elaborate process. After we ladle boiling jam into
hot jars and submerge them in boiling water for a set period of time (around 15
minutes), my friends always ask, “That’s it?”
Yep, that’s all there
is to it. It ain’t rocket science.
My annual routine
includes an epic tomato sauce-canning weekend each summer. It’s a pain to scout
farmers’ markets until I can find a good deal on 80 pounds of overripe tomatoes
and then drop everything to cook for the next two days. Yet it’s so worth it
all year long.
By slowly cooking the
sauce on the lowest setting for an entire day, I achieve an amazing, sweet
roasted flavor. My secret ingredient is a splash of apple cider vinegar. Once
the sauce is put away, I’ve got a whole year of easy, homemade pastas and
pizzas ready to go. You can’t buy sauce that tastes this good.
This year, I’ve gained
a new skill: fermentation.
Turning cabbage into
sauerkraut doesn’t just preserve it — it turns it into a probiotic superfood.
Fermentation can break down chemicals that interfere with absorbing nutrients,
make nutrients more available to your body, and provide your gut with
beneficial microbes.
Our ancestors lived
without refrigerators, so they put up food because they had to. Even in a
modern world of grocery stores and global markets, sometimes the best-tasting
and healthiest choices are still the ones you grow and preserve yourself.
What about zucchini?
You can’t turn it into jam or pickles. But you can grate it and toss the stuff
into pasta, where it melts away. Or make zucchini bread. Or sauté sliced
zucchini in olive oil, sea salt, and dill. Or put little chunks of it in soups.
To preserve zucchini,
slice it, blanch it for three minutes in boiling water, and stick it in your
freezer.
That mammoth
10-pounder? I made three batches of zucchini bread and five meals out of it.
There’s a bit more left in my fridge. Want some?
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author
of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do
to Fix It. OtherWords.org