Figuring out first-hand food
I’ll eat anything pickled. Take the woodiest, stringiest vegetable – hell, take shoe leather – and soak it in brine for a while, and I’m fine with it. And since we seem to produce a lot of woody, stringy vegetables around here, pickling is the natural solution. First came the beets. While they weren’t the [...]
It’s a sickness, canning. I recently went on record, in a cantankerous rant, as believing that freezing, for most applications, is a far better preserving technique than canning. Since then, I’ve become even more skeptical of preserving harvest bounty in little jars. So why can’t I stop doing it? I remember a conversation with my [...]
Hurricane warnings divide the world into two kinds of people: the prepared, and us. The prepared have a generator, purchased well before Home Depot ran out of them. They have batteries and bottled water, canned food and first aid kits, flashlights and radios. They’ve filled all their gas tanks, boarded up all their windows, secured [...]
More accurately, it should be “Moron canning,” in light of the fact that, before I start my next canning rant, I’m going to tell you the story of my crabapple jelly. It began weeks ago, when Kevin and I were invited to dinner at the home of our friends Julie and Greg. We had just [...]
It’s time to have a frank discussion about canning. As all of us north of the equator are feeling fall’s first vibes, visions of beautiful rows of preserved garden bounty are preoccupying anyone with a tomato plant and a mason jar. Who doesn’t love the idea of a pantry full of jams and jellies, pickles [...]
I’ve tried canning exactly once. It was back when we lived in Manhattan, and had a whiskey-barrel garden on the roof of our building. One year we ended up with a nice crop of red peppers, both hot and sweet, so I thought we’d try hot pepper jelly. We picked, we chopped, we processed. We [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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