Keeping the Harvest.....

So it's been far too long since my last blog post, but now, the day before Thanksgiving, I finally have a little time on my hands.

The garden has been put to bed, almost.   Late to mid October, me and Dawn cut down the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers and broccoli.   I pulled up the last of the carrots (some of which, left to grow the proper amount of time, actually got to a decent size!) and beets (ditto), pulled off the green peppers, hoping they'd go to red in our fridge, and gathered up all the green tomatoes to bring inside.

It's comforting, after a few years, to start to have a ritual.   Now I know when the heat goes on in late October (we can never make it to November 1!), upstairs comes the little wooden, three-shelved "onion box" I got at an unfinished wood store, with little mesh grates on the doors.   It lives in our back hallway all winter, our impromptu "root cellar" where we keep onions, potatoes garlic and winter squash.

The dried garlic and onions I grew are gone - I always mean to keep them longer, but they are so good, I always say, what the hell, what if they spoil, live for today, and they go into everything I cook between August and October and then they are gone.  :(  Every year I vow to plant more.

The last of the potatoes are hanging on, and I am carefully plotting their fate, planning my last few potato dishes with them in mind.  But we are moving into a different phase of year, here in New England, something I am slowly getting used to.   When I realized that tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were only fresh here for a few months (more like six to ten weeks!), it brought me down.  How the heck are you supposed to eat the lush, sweet, local produce everyone rhapsodizes about, when October-May practically nothing grows?

Well, some people use season-extenders, which I'd like to learn more about, just like everything else I'd like to get around to (sewing buttons back on my coats, selling my stand-alone Ikea closet from two houses ago on Craigslist, writing a novel).   Apparently, with the right cold frame, you can get lettuce in January (and I might believe it - my lettuce is still going strong!) but until then I'll have to stick to a tried-and-true old farmwife tradition: food preservation.

So, a few seasons into my New England gardening education, it suddenly dawned on me: old school (ie, colonial) housewives couldn't go to the supermarket in January to get food.  They knew this in the flush seasons of July and August, and that is where our very most basic "processed foods" come from: jams, jellies, pickles, ketchup, mustard, relishes and sauerkraut, wine and beer.   Who knows if the nutritious value was preserved (was it?) but at least they had a little variety.    It also explains the difference between what we know as "Italian cuisine"  and "German cuisine."    Italy is linked with tomatoes, basil, zuccinis, and other fresh veggies of every kind.   Well, guess what?  It stays warm in Italy for a lot longer than in Germany, which is famous for bratwurst, beer, and sauerkraut.  Or worse, Russian food, where tomatoes often barely make it to ripe at all.   This is actually where my ancestors come from, and it is known for hardy root vegetables: potatoes, cabbages and beets.   Black bread.    Why?   Not because they are unhealthful and hate salads, but because this was what was available.



All this didn't really dawn on me until I started putting away my own food.   Of course, I also own a miraculous device called a "freezer" which gives me a huge leg up on all my colonial, Russian and German ancestors.   So, with the freezer, refrigerator and cold storage (plus deliveries by Boston Organics), here's what's on deck for food in late November:

Carrots, a few garden peppers, the last bok choy, cabbage, beets and parsnips in the fridge.  (everything except for the peppers could be in cold storage, but our back stairway is a little too variable to be reliable for everything!)

A pumpkin, 2 winter squash, potatoes, onions and garlic in the back stairway.

A bin of green tomatoes on the back stair.   Eventually they turn red out in the cold, or at least when they turn mildly pinkish I bring them in to ripen in the kitchen.   Their flavor isn't the same as summer, but it's not bad...
Also, I did make fried green tomatoes out of a few of them.  delicicious, but like rocks in the stomach :).

In the brand-new chest freezer, we've got baggies of frozen green beans, roasted tomatoes, and garden pesto.  Also, we had a friend trying to buy a significant portion of a grass-finished, organic cow, so now we have fifty pounds of the most delicious beef imagineable down there too.

oh yeah, and in the pantry there are pickled beans, jars of jam, and home-canned tomatoes.  (plus my crock of home-made wine vinegar.  It tastes pretty much like the red wine vinegar you'd buy at the store, so I think by next year I may be able to make everyone's X-Mas vinegar out of it!)

So, in terms of high quality ingredients, I feel like I might as well be living in a Whole Foods.   It's really flippin' cool to know that I have this much organic produce on deck, to cook whatever I want (although Dawn complains that she can't even find the ketchup in our tiny fridge, it is so stuffed with bags of produce).   I actually haven't been to the supermarket in weeks, and when I do go I buy cheese, bread, eggs and milk (and breakfast cereal and sometimes chicken).    Everything else, starch, veggies, and proteins are at my beck and call.   Survivalist I am not, I like my electricity and LOVE my chest freezer, but just like my New England predecessors, a full pantry makes me feel ready for winter.