Can It, Will You?

I have just made a revolutionary discovery: canning food. If everyone discovered canning, it is quite possible that all of this buzz about eating locally and sustainably grown food would actually be possible for more than 3 months a year.

It is certainly a summertime treat to eat fresh produce that you yourself or a friend has grown at home, or purchased directly from a farm stand by the roadside. There are now local weekly farmer's markets in many areas, you can subscribe to a CSA Farm (Community Supported Agriculture), and even some grocery stores have a section for locally-grown produce in season. But then winter hits Cleveland and we're back to buying under-ripe veggies shipped in from another continent and flavorless hothouse tomatoes because, well, what choice is there? Just sit back and get scurvy?

Well, my grandmother used to can. After they retired, my grandparents lived on two acres, of which nearly one full acre was "the garden." My grandfather got up every morning and tended to rows and rows of fruit and vegetables. My grandmother made sure that nothing he grew went to waste. She cooked lots of fresh food, gave some things from the garden away, and canned the rest for use in the winter. I used to think canning was a very difficult operation. There was talk of "sterilizing" and how important it was to get a good "seal". There was miles of shelving in the basement lined with mason jars and coordinating lids. It looked like an intimidating science experiment that probably wasn't much fun.

In my professional development, I have been researching optimal ways to freeze and preserve food since some of the cooking I do as a personal chef is not consumed immediately. While reading about best-practices for preserving food, I naturally came across canning as an option for long-term food storage. It didn't sound as complicated as I remember. Since I had some extra vegetables on hand and exactly one mason jar, I thought I'd see if canning was an impossibly labor-intensive, antiquated chore from my grandparents' generation.

It turns out that although there were a lot of pots of boiling water involved...it wasn't hard to do, at all. In fact, the whole operation was really quick and it was very easy to clean up. Canning was simple enough that I can't imagine NOT doing it again, especially when I am inundated with beautiful tomatoes from friends' gardens at the end of the summer.

Armed with this new skill, I am considering the possibility that the not-yet planted bed at the end of the back lawn may not get lilies and meadow sage after all. As I recall, asparagus flowers and squash blossoms....