It's easy to eat locally in Colorado in July. All the farmers markets have vegetables and fruits on offer; the CSAs have all started delivering. If you have a garden, you are probably up to your ears in fresh produce. We're having fresh salads every day, fresh cooked and raw vegetables, and delicious fresh fruits.
This is a good time of year to start your own Locavore diet, because now is the time you need to start puting up that Colorado bounty for the winter. So far I have picked and eaten gooseberries, Nanking cherries, pie cherries, and black currants from our yard. I've also harvested radishes and wild arugula, and dug the first new potatoes from my small overgrown garden.
I've put up tomato sauce by waterbath canning, using a little vinegar in each jar as the experts recommend. And I plan to can lots and lots more tomatoes, as sauce, salsa, chopped tomatoes, maybe tomato juice.
I have made three half-gallon jars of lactofermented green beans, one of sauerkraut, and three of cucumber pickles. These pickles are very easy to make, and don't require vinegar or water-bath canning. You just need refrigerator space for the finished pickles until you eat them all. I have written a little paper on lactofermentation; you can find it under "Blogs and websites" to the right.
I bought a vacuum sealer and put up a boatload of Colorado snap peas for the freezer, as well as many packages of green beans and a few of snow peas.
My fruit dryer has been busy with drying fresh herbs, MORE green beans, some sweet corn, a box of apricots, and a box of peaches. These are safely stowed in glass jars. I prefer to dry fruit since you don't need sugar, and unlike freezing they can be stored without any further input of energy. See my next post for the chokecherry adventure...
The Colorado cherries and apricots are done for the season. We just ate the delicious fresh sweet cherries and I didn't put up any.
As the weeks pass, some foods come into harvest in Colorado, and others go out.
Plans for the coming month:
- bread and butter pickles (whwnever I can find small pickling cukes)--these are water-bath canned. My mom used to make the best bread and butter pickles.
- Canning lots and lots more tomatoes, as sauce and whole tomatoes, and maybe salsa.
- Drying boxes of peaches and plums.
- Might try drying melon slices; I'm finding delicious melons from Monroe Farms at the farmers market. I've heard they're great dried.
- All kinds of summer squash can be dried, sliced thinly. They make nice crunchy snacks, and can be put into wintertime soups too.
- Other foods that dry well: bell peppers, anaheim peppers, and mature onions. I plan to do them all. For chili peppers, just string them and hang them; no need for electricity.
The refrigerator is groaning, filled to the gills with lactofermented pickles and fresh veggies. And the freezer is packed with frozen vegetables, and a couple of bags of whole grain flour staying fresh.
My DH complimented me on the fresh tomato sauce I served on pasta recently. He said, "this tastes like Italy". When we vacationed in Italy in 2005, the foods were so fresh and flavorful. The tomatoes were grown right outside the city, and trucked in fresh in the morning. Most of the sauces were fresh, the vegetables were crisp; everything tasted like itself, like it should.
You don't have to go to Italy to get food this good though--just buy local organic Colorado produce, freshly picked and into your kitchen in a day or two. Warning: It does ruin your taste buds for stale, chemicalized, overprocessed food shipped from all over the world and kept in warehouses for weeks or months, or manufactured in a factory somewhere from ingredients you can't pronounce. No more strawberries tasting like sweet cardboard; no more flavorless melons; no more green beans already three weeks past their prime; no more peaches that go directly from hard to rotting without ever
stopping at ripe.
We've mainly been eating simple meals of meat, vegetables and fruits, but I have a few recipes to share with you in the next post.
1 comment:
I love reading your adventures in local eating. It actually inspired me to plant some tomatoes, cukes, peppers & squash. All but my tomatoes are great. my tomatoes are still green. :(
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