Summer Squash Straight from the Garden, Awaiting Blanching
A significant part of gardening, of growing your own food, is putting it by for winter. It’s been awhile since I’ve participated in this wondrous summer ritual. I had completely forgotten what joy it brings.
When I lived in the city on the East Coast, a neighbor and I invested in a canning pressure cooker and would spend from light to dark on Saturdays in our next-door kitchens canning vegetables we’d purchased at the wholesale markets. There’d be cases of beets and corn and green beans and peaches and cherries. It took us all day, many Saturdays, but it was a great way to spend Saturdays: up early and off to the markets, chatting away on our back porches as we pit cherries, steaming up our kitchens as we processed Ball jars filled with gorgeous vegetables, and – best of all – the satisfying pop of cooling jars as they sealed and we cleaned up our mess and fell into heaps of exhaustion. The preparation was as much fun as the eating, when, in winter, we took the beautiful jars out of the pantry and opened summer again.
My canning supplies are long gone. This year, we will freeze most everything. It seems healthier – the short cooking time preserving more of the nutrients.
This is the week we got to it: Harvesting basil, washing and chopping it and pasting it up with olive oil, then making little ice cubes out of it to be used in all sorts of dishes (especially beloved pesto.) Ah, the sheer bliss of smelling basil!
We also tackled the pile of squash – zucchini and yellow crooked neck. Got caught up with it and will next chop, blanch, chill and bag chunks of bright yellow scalloped squash. The apples are close. We will commit to daily processing to avoid wasting good food and putting it by at its freshest.
It is indescribable, the satisfaction of knowing there are homegrown, freshly processed vegetables in the freezer.
