Pepper Belly

I love spicy food and planted myself a jalapeno plant with the expectation that I'd have a few peppers throughout the summer to keep me in the heat.  I had no idea, however, how prolific that one plant would be, and I am finally having to cry uncle.  My family bailed on me weeks ago.  Sallies.  I couldn't stand for all those extra peppers to shrivel in my produce drawer, so I pickled them.  In just four days, I collected enough peppers to do this.

A little vinegar and water, a little salt, and a tiny pinch of sugar will give us summer grown fire in a jar all year.  Bring it, plant.  

Salsa

I love homemade salsa and thought this last weekend that I'd whip up a batch for canning.  Summer is giving off an abundance of tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro, so I gathered up the ingredients and dedicated a few precious Saturday hours to some intensive chopping and stirring.  However, I was NOT rewarded for my efforts.  Now I feel a little disgruntled that my plan failed for two obvious reasons that I should have seen coming.

First of all, you can't can fresh salsa.  Everything that is to be preserved must first be cooked.  Cooked salsa is not as good as fresh salsa.  Secondly, the recipe I found included sugar.  In fact, almost all of them did.  I'm not sure why, but I assumed that the addition of sugar would be ok.  Afterall, I'd never cooked salsa before.  Let me now be clear.  Salsa should never include sugar.  Garlic, yes.  Salt and lime juice, most definitely.  Sugar, no.

I speak generally, of course, but often wonder why is it that our culture thinks everything should include sugar (or more often high-fructose corn syrup).  My personal theory is that our taste buds have been trained to tolerate and even crave it since most industrially produced food does include it.  It is cheap, it is abundant, and because the government so heavily subsidizes the production of corn, we have to do something with it.  I've found that stepping out of the supermarket and into the garden gives you an appreciation for real flavor and an intolerance for things doctored with manufactured ingredients.  Michael Pollan, a favorite author, delves a little deeper into the subject in his article here.

So, now I have 8 pints of sweet salsa that I am contemplating dumping, which gives new and literal meaning to "all that hard work down the drain."  However, I think filling those jars with plain ol' canned tomatoes would be a better option this winter when the mood for fresh salsa strikes.

Bummer.

The silver lining in the salsa fiasco is my discovery that it is easy to peel and can a tomato.  While it would be virtually impossible to remove the skin from a fresh tomato, giving it a 30 second bath in boiling water makes quick work of removing the peel.  Simply score the bottom of the tomato with an "x" (careful not to cut too deep), dunk it in boiling water for half a minute, remove, and run some cold water over it (to stop the cooking process).  The peel will quite literally slide right off.  Chop, boil, and can.  No sugar required.

Before Hot Water Bath

After Hot Water Bath

My First Six Pints

I remember complaining years ago about having to eat home-canned food, all strange and sloshy and combined into weird things called "chow chow" and such.  I can hear myself now.  "Can't we just get the REAL thing at the store?"   Did you ever feel the same way?  "Homemade Mac and Cheese???  But I want the blue box!"  Oh, marketing.  How you fooled me then.  I stopped eating canned foods a while back, because they are just so nutritionally lacking, often full of things I don't recognize, and well, just so processed tasting.  I'll admit to succumbing to the convenience of canned tomato products and black beans, but small confessions aside, that lifestyle change left some slim pickins come winter time.  Now that I am gardening and drooling over sun-ripened peaches and the like at our local farmers' market, I have decided that my grandma was onto something.   I make chutneys.  I make salsa.  Why not can them while I have all these tasty ingredients right at my dirt-covered fingertips?  


The thought of canning seemed intimidating (what with dials and knobs and boiling water and botulism), so I took a basics class at a local farm.  Turns out, both the class and the chore were easy and delightful.  So now that I feel no fear of large steel pressurized pots, I've decided I can can.  I will can. 


I'm currently in Oklahoma with my parents drooling over my dad's exceptionally beautiful and abundant garden.  I swear his plants come out of the ground throwing squash, zucchini, peppers and corn at him.  We are in the (literal and figurative) heat of cucumber season and his bucket runneth over.  I've desperately tried to eat them all.  I've even contemplated slicing them over my morning bowl of Kashi.  But it appears that the only way to prevent waste (the horror) is to put them in a can.  Since I'm new to the sport, I picked a simple, 5-ingredient waterbath recipe called "Best-Ever Dill Pickles."  Prep time:  30 minutes.  Processing time:  10 minutes.  It goes like this:

In the beginning, there were jars.

In the middle, there was a lot of slicing.

In the end, there were pickles.  

Then, I cheated.  The directions say to wait one week before opening, but that must be only for those who have made their own pickles before or who possess more will-power than this first-timer.  The result?  Delicious.  Simple.  Plentiful.  Will need garlic.  (But then, really, doesn't everything?)  

This summer, I have dreams of a pantry full of jars filled with all things strange and sloshy.  And no blue boxes.  My kids can thank me later.