Mother Nature is a charmer most of the time; an alarmist some of the time. In early morning, I was checking my email at the computer in my den, a cozy room filled with books and heated in winter by a gas insert stove. The familiar song of the mourning dove interrupted my train of thought.
“Hoot-whoo, hoot whoo,” it sang, the sound coming from my left, where the fireplace is located.
My reaction was of alarm, rather than charm, as I quickly concluded that our house cat had the dove between its cat jaws, while the bird was commemorating his last song. I got up and searched for the cat. He was asleep on my bed in the next room.
Listening again to the “hoot-whoo,” I returned to the den. The sound was definitely within that room, in fact, it was coming through the fireplace.
Thinking smart, I went out on the deck, climbed a bench and looked at the roof. There was the little dove, perched on the outer edge of the small chimney. I guess he enjoyed the view of his or her farm from that elevation?
If mourning dove looked out to the vegetable garden or the apple orchard, the song wouldn’t be so contemplative. It should sound more like “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes …” with a verse like, “She’ll be pickin’ pounds of produce when she comes, when she comes …” because Mother Nature knows no bounds to those pounds and that is the alarming part.
At this time of the growing season gardeners are up to their ear lobes in fruit and vegetables and only you can help them before they go under.
The good news is that all you need to do is take some of nature’s largess off their hands and “put it up” for winter. You will be so happy you did. The tastes of summer can be yours throughout the short days of the year when soups, crock pot dinners, casseroles warm you up on a cold winter day. However, you need to act now, while summer is churning out tomatoes, basil, corn, beans, apples, pears, peaches, peppers, summer squash, onions and all the herbs to flavor them.
The options for preserving all this food for use in winter have been around for eons. Even wild animals know to store food for winter. Some overeat and get quite fat during nature’s time of plenty (Sure glad we humans don’t do that). Others set out grains and nuts to dry, then store them in their burrows.
Dehydrating is a wonderful way to reduce the size of fresh food. Box-fulls of fruit can fit inside resealable quart bags for accessible, portable snacks, as in lunch boxes. Fruit rolls are fun and easy to make by way of dehydration.
Personally, I like to bake tomatoes by using Sunset’s and Mary Villemaire’s Baked Tomato Spaghetti Sauce Recipe. It’s easy, efficient and extremely multipurposed. Though the recipe is for spaghetti, I use the sauce in anything in which I would like the taste of a summer tomato. A whole extra-large lasagna baking pan makes about six pints of sauce to freeze in deli containers.
Applesauce is simple if you don’t mind smooth, pureed consistency. You will need a hand food mill. Quarter apples without peeling them, removing any detritus left behind by the apple worm. Fill a cooking kettle to the top with the apples. Add one cup of water. Cover and simmer until soft. It may take 30 to 45 minutes. Stir after 30 minutes to make sure there is still liquid. If the apples were on the dry side, you may have to add another cup of water. It depends on the apples. Some are very juicy, some not.
Cool the apples and then put them through the food mill. Add cinnamon/nutmeg/lemon juice to taste. You will not need sugar. The apples will have enough sugar as they are. Ladle the sauce into similar deli containers as the tomato sauce and freeze.
Remember to write on the lids what they contain. Also the date. I guarantee you will be amazed how wonderful the apple sauce or the tomato sauce tastes, even after one year, providing your freezer isn’t shut off from a PG&E power outage.
If that happens, you have my permission to “hoot and holler” to the powers that be who have wasted all your work.
The tomato recipe is available by request at [email protected].
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.
