Although slightly behind due to the weather, harvest season is starting. For the women who came before us this was a full-time job that required a full-time commitment and more. This was also a time when women had to wake up before dawn to stoke the fire, start the bread, milk the cows, churn the butter and patch the dungarees. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Regardless of what used to be, my typical day currently looks something like this:
1. Wake up with alarm. It may or may not be dawn. Depends on the time of year.
2. Let dog out, brew coffee, take shower, dress child prepare lunches, breakfasts, etc. Turn on Disney Channel/Nick Jr. and pray for a meltdown free morning.
3. Rush off to office and punch in just under the wire. Work a full day.
4. Leave office. Make any and all last-minute stops. Funny how last-minute turns into last 20. Barely make it home/to daycare on time.
5. Get to house, find solace in an adult beverage. Try to come up with a nutritious tasty dinner that does not come from a box and takes only 20 minutes to make. Often experience big, fat failure.
6. Catch up on house work, MAYBE, watch a favorite tv show. pass out while trying to read your favorite book, wondering where the devil the day went.
7. Spend your weekends trying to cram an entire week’s worth of “home-work” in. Inform your family that if they would like to eat they need to pick up the phone or open a box of Cheerios. You are done.
If this looks at all like a typical day for you, adding harvesting and preserving your vegetables may seem like the straw that will crack your spine. When I add things like jam, relish and pickle making and blanching and freezing pounds of greens and peas to an otherwise ridiculous day it seems physically impossible to do it all. When I tell friends that I stayed up until midnight making salsa, they look at me like the elevator stopped traveling to the top floor. I would be lying if I said the harvest was not time-consuming or did not mean burning the candle at both ends. There have been many a tear shed on a Tuesday night when the salsa was barely going into the jars at midnight, let alone being processed. I can tell you, however, that it is worth every tear-stained, pepper burned, sliced finger of it. If you are thinking about giving preserving the season a try with goods from your own garden, CSA share, or routine trips to your local farmstand/farmers market, here are some tips that will help you keep your sanity and enjoy your hard-earned goods.
1. Get a Foodsaver or one of the knock off’s. We have a Rival and it is amazing. I am not sure how I ever got by without it. Freezing raspberries this evening took 15 minutes and they look like they will last forever and taste good too. Preserving the season is done in vain if your frozen goods taste like yucky ice.
2. Make something you have never made before. With part of our raspberry harvest this year I made GF raspberry cupcakes with raspberry buttercream frosting. This is not some thing I would normally make, but I was inspired by the fruit and my family loved them because they tasted like summer in a cupcake. It did not seem like hard harvest work when I was licking the frosting. off my nose, and my fingers, and my lips.
3. A blanch a day keeps the doctor away. If you can blanch and freeze one set of veggies either from garden or CSA a day, you will have a freezer packed with fresh and delicious vegetables in no time.
4. There is always room for more kale. Or swiss chard. Or beet greens. If you get a lot of greens (there is more in this world than spinach), you can add them to pretty much every casserole, make a great bed for poached eggs or make a yummy addition to a salad or a sandwich. Kale chips are an amazing snack that is super easy to make.
5. Do what you want. If you don’t like salsa, don’t make salsa. If you really hate Kale, give it to a friend or donate it to a food pantry. Preserving the harvest is about wanting to enjoy the taste and health benefits of the growing season. If you don’t like it now, you will not like in weeks or months. If you don’t love making jams, jellies, relishes and preserves don’t do it.
6. If you take the time to freeze..take the the time to blanch. Blanching your vegetables is key to keeping them fresh and tasty by killing enzymes. Over-blanching kicks them into high gear. Under does not completely destroy them. Take a peek at the Ball Book or the Better Homes and Garden cookbook. Both places give you a detailed charts on how long to boil and when to throw them into the ice-water. It takes time and can be hot, but is worth every minute.
7. A food processor/grinder is a must have. It can take hours to chop by hand and it doesn’t make it taste better. It just makes you angry and no one will give you a medal for it, because no-one cares.
In the end, it is a lot of work. and it can take a lot of time, as clearly evidences by the 6 days it has taken me to write this. Women 100 years ago did not have all the conveniences we have now, but did not have all the same stresses or time consumers we have now. In the end however, when you are craving a homemade blueberry muffin or a reuben with homemade thousand island dressing there is nothing like finding and tasting delicious items from your own stores. The best advice I can give: Try it. If you don’t love it, let someone else do it for you. If you do, keep trying new and fun things with new and fun vegetables. I promise your palette and your health will thank you. I was hoping to have some sumptuous photos of some of the delicious things that harvest season has brought to our kitchen, however, I am having some photo difficulties. Stay tuned for some specific recipes and photos.
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On behalf of the gluten free community at large I feel that I must say…REALLY? REALLY FDA? REALLY EPA? REALLY Organic food producers. So in case you haven’t heard, they have published a new study essentially saying that some brown rice, brown rice syrup and any products containing these things have unsafe levels of arsenic. So if you are out of the loop, check out this story on Arsenic-Organics-Rice from ABC. Historically, I hear a story like this and think “Eh, something is going to get me anyway. ” Salt, Eggs, Plastic. Most recently, wheat. What is the number one substitute for wheat? You guessed it…rice. Most recently in fact, I switched from using white rice flour to brown rice flour in an effort to BE HEALTHIER. Turns out that was perhaps not a great choice. So here I sit wondering what actually IS safe for me to eat? Should I even be all that worried for myself at this point? Might I end up looking like the kids from Flowers in the Attic? I don’t really know the answers to any of these questions but I do know this: These kinds of studies just re-energize my commitment to eating whole, local and fresh foods. As for everything else it really is kind of a crap shoot. That is not to say I am going to run right out and by some rice formula for a baby, but for myself, I am quite certain that a bagel made of rice flour will still pass these lips and I am not about to alter the best gluten free baking mix ever for my sweet baked treats. I will do some more in-depth research, but so far, the brown rice I buy, Bob’s Red Mill, has not been implicated in the arsenic explosion. So at the end of the day, the lesson learned here is one we try to live by: Know what you eat and where it comes from. Followed closely by: Something is going to get me. I am happy to be informed and hope we continue to get this level of transparency when it comes to our food source, but am not going to sound the alarms and change my whole life. Any other gfree folks or avid rice eaters? Please share your thoughts or suggestions. Happy Eating, Shopping and Ingredient reading.
Adventures in Farmgirl Chic 