The Most Important 90 Days of the Year
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One of the most common complaints about organic food that I hear is, “It costs too much. I can’t afford to eat organic food.” And I say, “You can’t NOT afford to eat organic food. The conventional and processed food you eat is really a delivery system for a host of toxic chemicals.” Besides, we are entering the season when organic food is cheaper than most conventional food sold in a supermarket—if you know where to look.
June, July, August, and early September is the time when organic fruits and vegetables from your own garden, from an organic farm, or a Farmers’ Market are cheapest, locally grown, and at their most nutritious and flavorful.
These 90 days come and go quickly, so we all need to act just as quickly to preserve as much as we can of this bounty to have for the other nine months of the year—you know, the months when the tomatoes don’t have much flavor, the fruits are coming from South America, and the vegetables are grown a thousand miles away in California or Florida.
First of all, these 90 days are the only time of the year when the seasonal fruits that are locally grown are available. This is especially true of the stone fruits—cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines—and berries—blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, blackberries, and others. Not only are these fruits horribly expensive in the off season, the varieties are usually limited to those that ship well, and that quality trumps flavor and nutrition. When the local fruits are in season, it’s much more likely that they will be a variety that’s been selected for flavor and nutrition because they don’t need to be shipped long distances.
And don’t forget wild foraged foods in the summer. Have you ever heard of wineberries? They are a brambleberry so fragile that they can’t be shipped and can barely be picked and sold at a roadside stand—even in areas where they grow wild. And yet they are as delicious a berry as you can imagine. If you live in a rural area of the Mid-Atlantic States, you’ll undoubtedly know wineberries. Pick them and freeze them in a single layer on trays in your freezer, then when they’re hard, transfer them to a freezer bag for adding to fruit compotes during the 50 weeks when you can’t otherwise get them at all.
The best way to handle those stone fruits and wild-foraged berries is by making a couple of quarts of honey-lemon syrup by mixing a half cup on honey with the juice of four or five lemons and dissolving this in two quarts of filtered or spring water. Place the mixture in a large bowl. Peaches should be freestone varieties and need to be peeled by plunging them in boiling water for a minute, then rinsing under cold water. The peel will strip off easily. Hold the peach in one hand, slice off segments with a knife with the other hand, and let the slices fall into the syrup. Nectarines, apricots, and cherries just need to be de-stemmed, pitted, and sliced as you wish. Add them to the liquid. Add any summer berries that you like, including wild-foraged wineberries and black cap raspberries. Ladle peaches, fruits, and berries into freezer bags—but not zip-lock bags—with just enough syrup to insure they’re covered when the bag is closed. Get freezer bags that you close with a twist tie. This is because you’re going to tighten the top of the bag so all air is excluded and the fruits are entirely under the syrup. Then freeze. When you want to use a bag, float it in a bowl of hot water from the tap, but don’t add more hot water later. In about 40-50 minutes, the fruits will be just thawed and really tasty.
If you’re into live-culture, probiotic, fermented foods, now’s the time to make your own pickles, chow-chow, sauerkraut, kim chee, pickled beets, and other pickled veggies. If you have room in your freezer, store them in there when they’re ready to eat, and when you thaw them out in the off months, they’ll still be ready to eat. Or, can them in a boiling water bath. This will kill the live cultures, but you can then store them on your cellar’ or pantry shelves, and they’ll still contain the enhanced flavors and nutrition that natural fermenting gives them.
Some foods store well in a cool cellar or storage room with no processing. Put down newspaper on the floor and lay winter squash like Butternut or Hubbard with thick skins on the paper so they don’t touch. They’ll keep through the cold months. Garlic and tight-necked yellow onions can be braided if you have their tops still attached, or in mesh bags in not. Just tie a piece of string tightly around the bag between each onion—again, so they don’t touch. Hang them from a rafter or pole in the storage room and they’ll keep well through most of the winter.
Root vegetables like carrots, beets, rutabagas, turnips, and potatoes can be stored in clean plastic garbage cans. Put in six inches of dry peat moss in the bottom, then cover this with a layer of the vegetables arranged so they don’t touch, then cover with another layer of peat moss. Add more root veggies and more moss until the can is full. Store this in as cool a place as you have, but one that won’t freeze. You can store a lot of root vegetables this way. When you retrieve some for dinner, wash them well to remove any moss.
Don’t forget drying. The Pennsylvania Dutch always made “schnitz,” the word means “cuts,” when the apples came ripe. They were made by coring and cutting apples into slices that were then strung on a long string and hung in the warm kitchen until dry. They could be eaten plain like fruit chews or re-hydrated in water. Make and can apple sauce with no added sugar. Invest in a food dryer and dry summer fruits.
And of course in high summer, when the tomatoes are perfect, buy some flats, plunge the tomatoes in boiling water, peel them and cook them down to sauce, then can the sauce. Some people simply put whole ripe tomatoes into freezer bags and freeze them, then thaw them out in winter as needed.
And the corn. It’s ripe and organic in high summer and as cheap as it will ever be. Don’t be tempted to freeze corn on the cob. It doesn’t work. When you try to thaw it out, the kernels turn to mush before the cob thaws out. Best to boil the corn just until it’s blanched, about two minutes, then cut it off the cob and freeze the kernels in meal-sized freezer bags. Before a winter dinner, thaw out the kernels by placing the bag in a bowl of water hot from the tap. When thawed, gently finish heating the kernels in a saucepan over low heat on the stove. You’ll be surprised how much they’ll taste summer fresh.
The same holds true for garden or English peas. Blanc them in their pods in boiling water for a minute or 90 seconds, drain, and freeze them in their pods. Thaw them in hot tap water when you’re ready to use them. The pods will have turned to mush, so discard them, but the peas inside will be lightly cooked. Finish cooking them with just a minute’s low heat in a sauce pan with a little water on the stove. They’ll also taste summer fresh.
If all this sounds like work, it is. But it’s pleasant work and valuable, because you’ll be eating the best organic food at its peak of flavor and nutrition all through the other nine months. It will cost you less than what you’d pay for conventional food at the store. And if you grow these foods yourself in your own garden, you’ll pay far less.
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