Our tomato haul this year was pitiful-we still have a lot to learn about gardening at 6850′. In my defense, not too many folks did well with tomatoes around here. We had a long cool spring and the tomatoes didn’t really take off until late. One of our friends got exactly two ripe tomatoes. We didn’t get many more.
It probably wasn’t the best year to plan a tomato tasting party, but we stalled it until late September. Everyone brought different varieties, which was instructive in itself to find which ones would actually ripen in the challenging conditions we all experienced. Amish Paste is doing well for us; our neighbors swear by Stupice, which might replace our go-to Early Girl, and we liked the Black Krim as well. At least we got a bunch of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes. I ended up ripening a few gallons on the counter after the frost and got a dozen jars in the cupboard, but I fear we’ll be doing the walk of shame down the Costco canned goods aisle before next summer.
That’s not to say that the canner has been sitting idle on the shelf. I put up a bunch of fruit, mostly apples and pears foraged from the park and friends’ orchards. Our peach trees lost all their blossoms in the frost, but R brought me boxes of peaches from Salt Lake to put up. We had plenty of green tomatoes to make this pie filling, which is wonderful on oatmeal when we want a change from peaches or pears.
That’s not to say that the canner has been sitting idle on the shelf. I put up a bunch of fruit, mostly apples and pears foraged from the park and friends’ orchards. Our peach trees lost all their blossoms in the frost, but R brought me boxes of peaches from Salt Lake to put up. We had plenty of green tomatoes to make this pie filling, which is wonderful on oatmeal when we want a change from peaches or pears.
There are jars of jam, herb-infused vinegars, a tomato-apple relish and enough salsa to make a thousand tacos stacked up around the place. It’s a different way of thinking about food, to try to estimate how much of something you’ll use before it comes back into season. And when the ducks destroy the winter squash crop, there’s no recovery for another 15 months. Happily, our friends were awash in squash. But that’s a different kind of food resiliency than relying on the grocery store for variety.
The next step up in home food preservation is putting up meat. I’ve also been getting more comfortable with pressure canning chicken and broth. The first few times are nerve-wracking, in that messing it up could potentially have deadly results. After a few times, my approach is now careful and respectful of the risks, but not anxious. We have a half a lamb on order from our friends, so I’ve been emptying the freezer of last year’s poultry harvest by boning it and canning it up. And once the meat is off the bones, I make that into some of the best chicken stock ever.
Another thing we’ve been doing is experimenting with fermented foods. Lacto-fermenting is hard to get used to, it’s so different compared to canning in that there are basically no rules. All the canning recipes warn of impending death if you change the proportions of ingredients. When making fermented vegetables like sauerkraut or salsa, so long as you get enough salt in the mix, you can change it up however you like. And the stuff lasts forever in the frig. We made a green tomato-apple salsa in October that is still crisp and fresh two months later.
Now it’s December and almost everything is safely stored in the freezer, jars or our make-shift collection of ice chests in the garage standing in for a root cellar, stuffed with carrots and potatoes. The only thing left to process are these bad boys, pumpkins grown for their hulless seeds rather than their flesh. I’d never heard of them either, apparently these are where shelled pepitas come from. The flesh doesn’t have much flavor. Even the goats aren’t so interested in them. Right now they are stacked up in the guest shower, waiting to be processed.
And in case you wondered, we actually eat all this stuff. A can of boneless chicken and some leftover mashed potatoes get made into a quick shepherds pie. I love polenta cooked in chicken broth for lunch. Or I’ll make creamed chicken on biscuits, the kind of recipe in my mom’s cookbooks from when she got married in the 1960s that fell out of fashion, replaced by “convenience” foods, mostly made by dumping Campbells soup mix onto frozen vegetables and calling it homemade. It’s a marvel of 20th century marketing that convinced people that “escaping the drudgery of housework” could trump good taste. Fifty, seventy-five years later, the standards are so low, it’s hard to call most of the packaged stuff food, it’s so filled with artificial flavors, extenders, substitutes.
We got lucky, we rediscovered real food and we aren’t going back to the false promises of big ag, tv commercials, and factory food. It started with homegrown tomatoes, then potatoes, and getting layer hens blew the lid off of all the assumptions that what we buy was as good as it gets. It’s not the same, it’s better in almost every case. Actually I can’t think of anything we have grown or raised that hasn’t been better.
The truth is, the work isn’t drudgery, either in the garden or the kitchen. Even when the quantities coming out of the garden are overwhelming, there’s also a sense of abundance. And there’s a special satisfaction I get when I hear the canning jars seal with a ping as they cool on the counter, only exceeded by the sound of R popping open a jar of peaches in January. It feels correct to be engaged in the cycle of the seasons, from the first spring greens to the stored up goodness of winter squash, even marked by the occasional absence of a tomato. We’ll never produce 100% of our own food, nor do I think we should. Neither do I think we should be dependent on an the big ag-pharma industrial complex that cares nothing about our health, our environment, or anything but extracting from our pocketbooks. In the fight against the machine, every tomato counts.
