My first memories of fruit butters are driven out of Carbondale, Illinois, which seemed worlds away from the Chicago suburbs, both in station-wagon miles and in accent. Maybe Aunt Harriet’s slower cadences and shifts and drawls reinforced her patience for hours and hours of bubbling the moisture out of the orchard’s apples and peaches. All…
Category: put it up
preserved
Good Day, Sungold
And good-bye, Sungold. I’ve been picking nearly a pint a day from my Sungold cherry tomato plant for the past couple weeks. I’ve frozen them like little marbles to pop into soups and sauces this winter. I’ve oven-dried them for hours, creating raisiny, orange bursts of sugar that take up less room in the freezer…
Swap-Box Hero: Gimme a Beet
When I was a kid, beets were sweet and syrupy and neon magenta. Gramma C called them “Harvard Beets.” They probably came out of a can. I never knew there was any other kind. And I loved them. I’m told that’s unusual – that beets are a taste acquired in adulthood, and that most young…
Butterfly effect: Pickled carrots
Today, I swapped a ginormous eggplant (I’m sure it wasn’t, but it seemed as big as my head) for an extra bunch of gorgeous carrots, precisely so I could pickle them once I got home. I knew I had a couple robust dill plants that had volunteered their way from my balcony last year into…
Swap-Box Hero: Okra Edition
I might’ve thought we were close enough to the Mason-Dixon line for our CSA picker-uppers to consider okra a treat, but based on the end-of-night swap-box contents for the past two weeks, it’s vegetabilis non grata in these parts. Truth be told, one of those bags last week was mine: I traded in a pound…
O Caponata! My Caponata!
The blue ribbons in this week’s sharebox were actually purple: Six perfect, wee eggplants. I dispatched three of them straight away Monday night (a Meatless Monday), sauteéing a quick pasta topping that included onions, patty-pan squash, Malabar spinach, and a confetti of cherry tomatoes, all from this week’s share. The remainder I earmarked for a…
Blackberry-Bourbon Jam
Vanilla beans and lemon zest make their way into most of my berry-based preserves. But last season’s final batch of blackberry jam had to settle for a tablespoon of vanilla extract; I was out of beans and didn’t want to head to the store just for that one item. It was, however, homemade extract that…
All Ears: Sweet Corn to Savor and to Save
I’ll own it. I’m a bit of a corn snob. Not for a particular variety of corn, though I do celebrate the day in August when the first Silver Queen comes in. Nor for corn from a particular place, though I grew up smack in this country’s Corn Belt (seriously, my middle school was literally surrounded…
Squashapalooza Day IV: Zucchini to relish
Squash remaining: 4. Days remaining: 4. Thursday’s my day off. Well, it’s my day off from my paying job. In the summer, it’s my best shot to take care of the two tasks that seem to be on an endless loop: tend the garden and put up produce. Sadly, crazy heat and sudden thunderstorms seem…
Crisper-cleanout giardiniera
Monday mornings, I try to clean out my fridge to make room for the new week’s share-box contents. So far this season, I’ve been keeping up fairly well, tossing out just a few items I never got to. Today’s partial casualty, a forgotten handful of snow peas, now two weeks aged and slimy, was hiding under a…
Boxing Day 