When my grandmother, Ruth Bailey, was alive, she’d sometimes say what the Montana farmers say: “We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.” That still makes me smile.
It’s canning time again on the old farm – I mean, Casa Blanca, our house out on the Point. Canning is the new knitting, which is to say, it’s not new at all, just the latest return-to-your-roots fad for allmanner of hipsters.
And yet, I’ve been canning jams and other foods since I was 12. Yes, that’s right – boiling the jars, melting paraffin in a coffee can on the stovetop, ensuring that no one dies of botulism, whipping out the old Seal-a-Meal – the whole shebang. (I’ve also been knitting since I was 6 – because that’s just the kind of trendsetter I am.)
So I’m no stranger to canning. Last year, you may recall, I was enslaved by the overproduction of a very fertile zucchini patch, and its nefarious cousins in the cucumber plot. I made pickles and giardiniera and zucchini bread and the like, til we were all green in the face.
This year, thanks to crappy weather, smoky skies and general June gloom that hasn’t yet gone away, I have little to nothing growing in the squash department. I have had maybe 5 cucumbers from three bushes. The only one that is edible size right now is a freak of gigantic proportions that chose to grow against the patio, but behind a conduit pipe. Thus, it is pinched in two like a fat balloon about to be turned into a wiener dog toy. I was going to pick it, because I deserve to eat everything I have sweated over for four months, but it is so peculiar just growing there, unable to push or pull itself out of limbo. I think I will leave it there as an object lesson to other cucumber blossoms that wish to escape their natural fates.
So no ice-box pickles. No zucchini relish. Not much in the pickle department at all this year. Instead, it’s been the year of the plum. I have been given plums by many, many kind Alameda folk as well as my mother in Sonoma County and my friend Cathy in El Sobrante. I’ve made fruit roll, a.k.a. fruit leather, a.k.a. Fruit Fly Heaven. I’ve dried bowl after bowl of them, and can look forward to lots of dried plums for snacks and baking. We will be eating (and gifting) plum jam til kingdom come. Yellow plums, red plums, cherry plums, Satsuma and Santa Rosa – they’re all good.
But wait -- there’s more. I’ve already helped clean up a neighbor’s windfall apples, and canned several pints of applesauce. Those were Jonagold. But the Gravenstiens are just coming in – so here comes more applesauce, plus my daughter’s favorite – apple pie, and jars of pie filling canned for the next year. Dried apples? The kids love ‘em.
Did you realize how much fruit just falls to the ground in Alameda? Look around – you’ll see lemons, oranges, apples, plums, and more. Take a walk through just about any deserted lot – along the Estuary, the back of your neighborhood park or school – there are blackberries everywhere right now, and yes, indeed, I have canned (local) blackberry jam, frozen the berries and made a blackberry galette to die for already. This weekend: more of the same.
What else? I’ve got a batch of lemon liqueur steeping next to some plum brandy in a couple of gallon jars. In a dark place in the laundry room I have some quarts of preserved lemons, the translucent skin salty and fragrant, for pastas and Mediterranean dinners.
The tomatoes are proliferating with abandon, so we’ve started on a parade of tomato treats: pasta sauces, chunky hot salsa, green tomato pickles, fried green tomatoes, Caprese salad, or a fat slab of juicy red tomato on sourdough bread with a sprinkle of sea salt and freshly ground pepper.
Are you hungry yet? So am I. I wish I could capture the flavor of those tomatoes to use year-round, but they change when they’re cooked, and though delicious, it’s never the same. And a store-bought tomato, even a hothouse-grown, organic on-the-vine tomato will never match up with the flavor of one you grew yourself.
My weeknights and weekends are full while I bring in the harvest. How about yours?
