Preserving

It's that time of year. I got a taste of it last year but this year it just feels right, it's not a chore. We are preserving food for the winter. That means fermenting, freezing, canning and jams.

Frances does the jams and the sweet stuff. She's been making everything out of green tomatoes: mincemeat, chutney, dill "pickles. She made a mincemeat crumble this morning and it was so great. No chow sadly. And she made lots of jam and jelly out of all the chokecherries that grow everywhere in August.


This evening we canned up probably at least 30 litres of tomatoes. All different colours, reminds me of the tri-colour pasta. It's nice to have canned tomatoes for the winter. I suppose ideally we'd love to have enough canned for two one litre jars a week, at least. Really easy to do too. I never thought about the canned tomatoes that I bought before but they are I think lined with that chemical that everyone was worried about in their plastics. Is it BPA? And a wwoofer told me that it's likely that the tomatoes are cooked in massive aluminum pots, wherever the hell they cook them up. Not exactly a nice process. Even if we buy organic that doesn't mean they were produced in a healthy way. So what better way than to can them up yourself?


We made lots of pickled beans this summer. Some with chillies and some without. We pasteurized them which is too bad but means that they'll last a bit longer. One can only eat so many beans right?

As usual I'm making my kale chi on a weekly basis. As the leaves are frosted they become more purple and the kim chi changes colour which is cool. I also grated three gallons of kohlrabi and we are krauting it up. It smelled so amazing. The salt is definitely running out and I still don't have any idea how to make it. Do you?


We got a bunch of basil from our friend Candy. She has a greenhouse and grows huge basil plants. Much bigger than anything I grew this summer. Thanks to a generous donation of pine nuts from our friend Alison, we made a few litres of pesto for the winter. I can't wait, I love pasta more than anything I'm coming to realize.

Last and never least, we bought a nice dehydrator and have been drying zucchini and apple and some mushrooms. We might make some jerky in it though this reveals how much flesh is mostly water, as you end up very little in the end.