Open season for canning

I've ordered a box of apricots from the Fruit Group in Cotati which I hope to pick up on Thursday. This is a fairly sweet deal - a family with orchards over in the Valley who take orders and then provide the fruit in quantity for those of us who like to make preserves, etc. , and don't grow our own here in this coastal county. Last year the nectarines I bought were actually ripe, far better than supermarket fruit for less than $1 per pound. I gave some away, ate some, and made chutney and preserves.

I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's paean to home canning tomatoes in the May-June Mother Jones. (Haven't afforded the book yet, and there are more than 200 people on the waiting list at the library.) She's right on about a couple of things, and says them better than I would have.

"I think of canning as fast food, paid for in time up front."

and, of frozen tomatoes,

"Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/seeing_red.html

Extending the season of our local food supply is what preserving is all about, to add variety when all that's in the market are root vegetables and apples. That's the way it was in my New England childhood before supermarkets stocked air freighted produce. Summers were punctuated by family parties to get the bumper crop of green beans or strawberries or tomatoes into the freezer. A task I took on around age 12 was foraging for wild strawberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, beach plums, rosehips, etc. - anything that I could make jelly or jam out of.

There's a persistence in this. In a month or six weeks I will go out in the hedgerows after one of the few things that are free in Sonoma County, blackberries, and love every moment of the tedium of making old fashioned seedless jam from them.

My mother didn't actually do much canning, as both she and her mother were always fascinated by new ways of doing things, and preferred freezing. Certainly the quality of some things - like the green beans, for example - were better preserved with proper freezing in a 0 degrees chest freezer. But canning, for those things that can easily and safely, and drying for some things, work okay, and are less energy intensive in the long run than freezing. When you can or dry, all the energy inputs for preservation are up front, and then things last a long time without losing quality.

The season for apricots is fleeting. I can buy good quality dried California apricots year round, but I'm fantasizing about just what kind of preserves or condiments I will have handy in my pantry to brighten meals next winter.