Saving Summer

As summer wanes, I’ve been getting that feeling of urgency about preserving its tastes for the coming fall and winter.  So I’ve been shelling field peas, snapping pole beans and getting them in the freezer.

And I have a big batch of pears from our trees in the refrigerator doing their overnight thing before I pack them in jars and process them tomorrow.  This will be my third batch of pear preserves in the last month and probably my last as there are just a few pears left on the trees.  On the first batch I did a not-unusual “Suzy trick” and got busy doing something else at the crucial time and they cooked a bit too long.  I was able to save them by adding some hot water and reprocessing them. They looked a bit dark, but Robert ate a half jar of them at one sitting the other day and said they were very good so I must have rescued them in time. 

For the second batch of pear preserves as well as today’s production, I carefully followed the directions in an ancient copy of the “Ball Blue Book:  The Guide to Home Canning and Freezing,” Edition 30 from 1977, and they turned out beautifully.  Of course I’m giving myself some credit for managing to pay attention to what I was doing.  

And here they are.  It is always a satisfying feeling to see these
jars with their fruits of your labor.

As for tomatoes:  I have been making tomato sauce by roasting paste tomatoes, cut and anointed with olive oil and salt and pepper, on the grill. I firmly believe in roasting many vegetables as it really intensifies the flavor.  And in the heat of the summer when I cringe at the thought of turning on the oven in the kitchen, it is painless to roast them on the grill outdoors.  Then I pull the skin off and pop them into a freezer bag to pull out for soups and stews in the winter. 

This is my trusty old food mill.  I suppose I could get a new
electric one, but this is so satisfactory that I don't see the need for
another new-fangled gadget when this one works so well.

But mostly I concentrate on taking the roasted tomatoes and making a rich tomato sauce from them.  I do this by putting them in my old hand cranked food mill and in no time flat I have a lovely sauce to put in the freezer. I used to add flavorings such as basil and garlic, but decided that if I left the sauce plain, I could use it for anything and add the appropriate flavoring then.  Of course, a lot of it goes into the production of homemade pizza so I might as well add basil and garlic, but one never knows . . .

And speaking of basil:  My next project is to pick and wash huge quantities of the fragrant leaves and with the help of the food processor (okay, I admit that this is a gadget that is worthwhile for many a kitchen task), grind them into a simple pesto (again with not much added except for a little bit of olive oil) and freeze the puree in ice cube trays.  When they are frozen solid, I pop the cubes out and put them into freezer bags and quickly back into the freezer.  These are so handy to have during the winter and I can add a cube or two to whatever it is I am preparing that requires basil. 

Hopefully, these tastes of summer will last us through the winter. 

Suzy