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…
Tag: Preserving
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…
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…
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…
Swap-box hero: Pickled scallions & scapes
Seriously, fellow Pennsauken picker-uppers: What have you got against garlic and onions? The swap box just before closing Monday night contained six bunches of red scallions, three bunches of spring onions, and three lovely swirls of garlic scapes. Right. Twelve alliums. Allii. Whatever. A tragedy in any language, even Latin. Bulbus, non reliquit, right? Right. So…
Swap-Box Hero: Strawbarb Preserves
One of the perks of being a site host is that you get to scavenge through the swap box at the end of pick-up day. This week, that meant we staff got to divvy up bundles of underloved endive and rhubarb. Thanks, but no thanks on more greens—I got plenty in my own sharebox. But…
Here We Go
Hey there. My name is Susan Crawshaw, and I’m the blogger behind Boxing Day. I grew up in the Midwest, the child of generations of teachers, farmers, and teachers of farming. Some of my earliest and fondest memories involve home-grown food, from tagging along with my grandfather to his tomato patch in the community garden…
Boxing Day 