On Canning, On Eating Locally, and On Why I Bother At All
It’s sort of interesting how some posts come about. Sometimes I very specifically know I want to try a recipe, I cook and photograph that recipe, edit the photos, write a little something, and post it to the world. Other times, something comes wildly out of left field and I MUST move it to top of my posting schedule (yes, I have one) because it will either lose relevance or because I’ve made some food I desperately want to share with you.
I had no intentions of writing about this, evidenced by the fact that I took not a single photo aside from before and after shots. This post arose out of a weekend in the kitchen what was, for lack of a better word, grueling. So grueling that it threatened to bring on a veritable identity crisis for this little food blogger.
Just in case you haven’t picked up on this, I care deeply about eating locally. I started this blog, in part, to chronicle my quest toward learning what that means and figuring out just how much of my diet I could change to local fare. This has involved shopping primarily at farmers markets, foregoing produce that isn’t seasonally available, avoiding chain restaurants, starting a garden, and learning the art and science of canning to capture produce when it’s plentiful so that I can eat locally all year long.
I’d say my experience with canning up to this weekend could be firmly classified in the “dabbling” realm. For a while I just made jam. There’s a reason that jam is widely considered an entry-level canning project. Couple together berries and sugar, boil the heck out of them, and you’re left with pretty little jars in brilliant shades of ruby and purple that taste delicious on everything from toast to ice cream. I’d graduated to making a few kinds of pickles, and I tried an inaugural batch of apple sauce last fall.
But none of those things are life-sustaining. They didn’t replace any staples that I was hitherto buying from the grocery store. I’d procured a water bath canner before my apple sauce project, and I knew I wanted to go further this summer. So this weekend, I took my first real crack at canning food that could potentially replace some store-bought staples with homemade ones.
Well.
Having selected eight recipes to try (if you’re gonna turn your kitchen upside down, you might as well get a lot done) I came home from the farmers market on Saturday morning well-stocked: two pounds of okra, five pounds of peaches, two quarts of figs, several onions and peppers, large handfuls both of parsley and basil, and, most importantly, nearly sixty pounds of tomatoes. I dug every every sizable pot and bowl from my cabinets and cheerfully set to work.
