fast grow the weeds

Yay!  Another opportunity to show off my latent O.C.D.!

Drying fruit is a fairly straightforward affair.  Preserving vegetables, both as frozen and as dried, requires a few more steps for you but fruit, thankfully, is easy-peasy.  Most of us have an oven, therefore, most of us can dry some fruit, especially if you’d like to try fruit leather.  In point of fact, fruit leather is the only thing I had heretofore tried to preserve, as I didn’t have a dehydrator of my own, either plug-in or solar.  The picture above is one of the school’s 3 dehydrators, liberated by yours truly for the upcoming blueberry onslaught.  Today, though, it’s strawberries.

Evapotranspiration is a mighty big word but it includes a concept (transpiration) you are probably already familiar with, even if you don’t think you are, and evaporation, which you already know.  All produce, all plants, transpire (wick water) as part of “what they do,” and the extreme form of this otherwise natural occurrence is dried produce, dried leaves.  There’s a certain formula of heat plus wind plus relative humidity and soil moisture that farmers look to to see how their crops are growing. On a global scale, evapotranspiration is how water is exchanged in the world (rain to trees/plants and back again), but in your kitchen or in your back yard, you can use it to help preserve your fruit harvest.

I am all in favor as you know of things you DON’T plug in to an outlet, and there are plenty of sites for solar food dehydrators out there.  Here’s one dear to my heart as it’s similar to the chicken tractor, plus it geeks out on the whole process of how it best happens (I do loves me some engineering).  Try this at home!!  Me, I am time-crunched this summer so the plug-in is the way I will go, for now.  These strawberries dried in six hours, and will keep for six months.

Nothing like a little O.C.D. with your project to get you wound up!

SO:  it’s fruit season in this hemisphere:  gotta make hay while that sun shines!  The non-fresh-fruit season is entirely too long in my humble opinion.  Freezing is the best way to preserve any fruit’s nutrients if you can’t eat it fresh. But like anything, freezing has an expiration date:  it is best to eat all frozen fruit within six months of freezing it.

We *love* fruit smoothies around here.  In point of fact, smoothies are the primary way we eat our fruit in the off-season.  I make our own kefir and yogurt, and it’s very easy to just run downstairs with the blender and grab a handful of frozen berries to whiz up for a treat.

Strawberries, cranberries and blueberries freeze wonderfully “dry,” that is, by themselves.  Cherries do too but one should pit them beforehand as trying to do it afterward leads to a wad of cherry mush in your hand.  The best way to handle these berries  is to get fruit at its absolute height of freshness, wash, stem and sort them and place them on cookie sheets.   As you can see one can go a little nutty with the sorting part.  Stick them in the freezer until hard then bag them up, squeezing as much air out of the bags as possible.  You’re now able to open the bags at will this winter and grab what you need, leaving the rest behind.

I also slice fruits like peaches and nectarines and strawberries and coat them with a bit of honey before bagging them up.  You could also cover sliced fruit with a bit of sugar or superfine sugar.  Coating them with a sweetener tends to help them retain their color and their flavor.  Making a syrup of one part honey to four parts hot water also works well:  the fruit is stored “wet” this way and keeps most of its flavor and nutrients intact.  And indeed one can freeze mashed or pulped fruit “wet” too, without sugar.

You know, most thawed fruit is but a pale simulacrum of its fresh self, so for the most part all my frozen fruit ends up in smoothies or cooked items.  I also treat freezing as a form of suspended animation if I have a huge harvest (like, the 30 pounds of cherries from last Saturday) that I can’t get to immediately:  pulling out the bag to make jam or baked goods is a true time-saver.  And I am always looking for more time….

Today’s berry, bubbling in the saucepan:  gooseberries

Gooseberries.  Finally, we have enough to “do” something with them, after three years of off/on harvests, so I grabbed a bowl yesterday and headed outside.  “Do you want to pick the gooseberries with me?” I asked my daughter.  “Nah, too prickly.  Can I pick the strawberries instead?”  Smart child.

I get all misty when I think about gooseberries.  A green variety adorned our wedding cake, they and some golden raspberries and some very red currants.  The cake probably had no flour in it but was made instead with almond flour, honey, and lots of egg whites.  It was a perfect summer cake, perfect for me that is, an avowed cake-hater, especially of the wedding variety.

But today I made four pints of jam.  Because I am usually terribly time-crunched and have no patience to tip and tail these things, what I do with little fruits like these is cook them down and run them through the fine sieve on my food mill.  The skins and those nasty pointy stems are left behind, and I measure out the resulting juice and pulp and figure out how much sugar and pectin is required to make a small batch of jam.  I cook down other seedy fruits the same way:  damson plums, cherries and those aronia berries have seeds too small to reach but (in some instances) too vulnerable to the food mill’s crushing turns so they instead go into a chinois that has a pestle to wring the juice from the pulp.  It sounds like I might have a crowded kitchen and it is true, I do, but the chinois does come in handy.

I just adore fruit, and fruit jam is one way to preserve all this bounty.  I will mention a few other ways in some following posts.

Another day, another berry to blog about

I picked up some aronia berries at a friend’s house on Friday.  This species of native berry is very high in antioxidants, especially the black and purple varieties; it has been labeled a “superfood” for that reason.  The variety we picked, Aronia albutifolia, isn’t so very high in this magical property.  No matter.  The red, sweet, jujube-shaped fruits were plentiful, and I got a gallon with which to experiment.

Traditionally one of the fruit sources found in pemmican, these bushes or shrubby trees normally yield clusters of pea-sized fruit in the fall.  Well, MY calendar told me it was late June, so I kind of scratched my head about this a bit:  can these really be red aronia berries (also called chokeberries)?  It would appear that they are.  Some time ago, these eastern American trees got exported to Poland and Russia and it was there that they became cultivated enough to be used widely as a juice berry, and its progeny got tweaked enough to ripen in June.  Normal aronia berries, the shrub-borne black variety (A. melanocarpa) ripen much later and are entirely too tart to be eaten out of hand.

Personally, I am highly suspicious of anything that is labeled a superfood, a culinary “magic bullet” to cure all that ails a person.  I also think that many people who look to a food as medicine aren’t doing the hard work necessary to maintain basic good health.  Diet and exercise certainly go a long way to keep the doctor away. Eating a decent diet and getting up off the couch is just plain too hard for most Westerners: thus, let’s look for some tonic, hopefully found on my grocer’s shelf, that will offset all my couch-sitting, all those extra pounds around my middle.

I’m also suspicious of the purported health claims tagged on things like aronia berries.  If it were true that eating these things magically cured you from ever getting cancer, do you really think this would be the first time you have heard about them?

With my skeptical eye, then, I turned these into jelly early this morning (with some of our grape juice and fresh cherries to help flesh out the taste).  A little slice of medicine on my morning toast?  Doubtful, but tasty.

The girl models edible jewelry in the form of garlic scape bracelets.  That’s part of the first round of garlic drying on a rack behind her, a harvest of about 10 pounds of softnecks from my tiny first-year bulbil sets.  They didn’t get as large as I thought but this was still a successful experiment.

Many, many things bloom and ripen at the same time and it is quite a boon for both we food gardeners and the people our gardens feed.  Strawberries and rhubarb, tomatoes and basil, peas and spring onions are a few at the top of my head/tip of my tongue. And there are items we seasonal eaters absolutely look forward to all year:  for me, it’s that one big pot of asparagus risotto, that first gluttonous binge of shell peas, that first ripe tomato, warm in your hand.

Somehow, however, my convergence gets off track, and it’s (mostly) my own damned fault.  I mentioned that my potatoes went in late this year.  I also mentioned that garlic is ONLY getting the greenhouse treatment from now on because the heads so produced are exceedlingly large and (thanks to the time warp that’s greenhouse living) early.  This means, therefore, that my garlic scapes are going to miss the first grabbled potatoes by as much as a month.  SIGH.  This, this is a shame.  Tiny potatoes and minced garlic scapes!  Divine!

Scapes are little twisty miracles all on their own, of course.  The flower stem of rocambole or hardneck garlic, there is raging debate if they should be left on or chopped off to ensure bigger heads below ground.  Frankly, I have never noticed a difference in the head size of scapes that escaped.  But I do what I can to harvest them all.  They can freeze successfully, and even have a fairly long life in the refrigerator if you keep them in a damp towel.  I won’t go that far.  All my potatoes are gone (and this is no hardship; they’re staples 10 months of the year) so I actually (gasp!) purchased three local Russets from the farm stand down the road.

I couldn’t let those scapes go without a little spud love….