Putting Up Food

Preserving food at home, or "putting up food," was once a necessity. Now it is considered to be an almost-lost art. My mother has always canned garden veggies, and I remember well the hiss of the canner on the stovetop. (Her canned green beans are fantastic!) There has been a renewed interest in canning and freezing foods in recent years. And with the current concern about the safety of commercially canned products in our grocery stores, I expect more and more people will be interested in how to preserve summer's bounty for the rest of the year.

I recently read an interesting article about community canneries. In some small towns around the country, there are places set aside for community members to preserve their own food. Canning classes are offered, and the equipment is shared and maintained by town citizens. What a neat idea! Here is a link to the story:
Community Canneries

The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a wonderful website, full of information about how to preserve foods. There are instructions on how to can, freeze, dry, cure, smoke and ferment foods. There are also instructions on making jams and jellies. If you are lucky enough to have a garden that is producing more food than you can eat, or if you want to stock up on veggies at your local farmers' market, check out this website. Be sure to follow instructions closely. If foods aren't preserved correctly, they are not safe to eat.
How to Preserve Foods at Home

Eating in Tune with the Seasons

There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year round, grown halfway around the world, picked when it was green, and ripened with ethylene gas. Although it looks like a tomato, it's kind of a notional tomato. I mean, it's the idea of a tomato.

- Michael Pollan, from Food, Inc.

Today it is hard to imagine that everyone once ate only fresh produce that was in season. There was a time when you couldn't get a fresh tomato in the middle of winter. Many of us don't even know when certain foods are in season, because they are always available to us at the supermarket. But there are many benefits to eating seasonal foods. You can buy them locally, supporting your local economy and reducing the energy needed to ship those foods. When foods are allowed to ripen naturally in the sun, they contain more vital nutrients than their artificially ripened imitators. And they just taste better! Below is a link to Sustainable Table's webpage about seasonal foods. At the bottom of the page, you can enter your state and the season, and a list of seasonal produce for your area will be brought up. It's a great tool to re-teach us how to eat in tune with the seasons.

Seasonal Produce Guide

New Blog Feature

Blogger now has a new feature for blog posts. At the end of each posting, there are squares you can click on to share that posting with others. There are options to e-mail the posting, share it on your own blog, on Facebook, etc. If you know of someone who may be interested in one of my postings, but doesn't follow my blog, please feel free to use this new feature! Thanks!

Waste Not, Want Not

Many of us end up throwing out much of the fruits and veggies that we buy. There are a few tricks to making your produce last longer, and not waste all of that food. Vegetarian Times has a nice article about what to store in the fridge, what foods should be stored together or separated, and other tricks for keeping your fruits and vegetables in their best shape!

Produce Storage Guide

First Tomato!!

My first tomato is growing!! It's a Roma tomato on the plant I thought wouldn't make it. It's exciting to see a tomato growing on a plant I started from seed.

Dreaming of Blackberries

It's blackberry season - that time of year when many will brave poison ivy, briars and chiggers to pick those sweet little treats. My daughter and I love to roam our property, looking for berries and tasting them right off the bush. Unfortunately, this has been a bad year for our berries. The intense heat is drying them into hard little pellets before they have a chance to ripen. We've only been able to find a few small handfuls. There won't be any blackberry pie or blackberries over ice cream this summer. Still, we will continue hunting for them and enjoying the few that we find. There's always next year...

Garden Update

My garden is doing well! More peppers have come on and are growing! I have had a handful of sugar snap peas. I'm going to try planting them again this fall, when the weather is cooler. I'm hoping I'll get more peas to grow then. The onions and lettuce are doing quite well. I've learned that if I cut off the lettuce heads at the stem, the stem will begin to grow more lettuce leaves. Every time I pick a green onion, I just plant another onion bulb in its place.

The tomatoes are more of a mystery to me. The plants have grown to be about 4 feet high and are putting on plenty of blooms. I still haven't seen an actual tomato, though. My mother explained to me that the plants that are started from seed at home will take longer to produce tomatoes than the plants bought from the store. I hope that's all it is and I'll see tomatoes soon! There is a process known as "suckering" and I'm wondering if I'm getting it right. Tomato plants need to be pruned so that you end up with one main vine. Large branches growing from the main vine, called "suckers," need to be cut so that all the nutrients can feed the main vine and grow fruit. I'm afraid of overpruning, but I don't know if I'm pruning enough. I am excited to see that the Roma tomato plant that I started from seed is growing well and putting on blooms, too. I didn't know if it would survive. One of the many things that gardens teach us is patience. It can be a hard lesson! :)

It's Greek to Me

Mediterranean meals are perfect for sultry summer days. I recently made my first Greek-inspired dinner and it was fantastic! I purchased lamb from the farmers' market and made marinated kebabs. To accompany the kebabs, I made tzatziki, a tangy, refreshing Greek dip. I grilled pita bread slathered in olive oil to dip in the tzatziki. Eaten outside in the cooling evening air, this meal was fun and delicious!

The recipes I used are Ina Garten's. She hosts The Barefoot Contessa on Food Network. The links are below.

Marinated Lamb Kebabs

Easy Tzatziki with Toasted Pita Crisps