Summer All Year Long

Summer is food. Trying to sum it up in one food seems impossible. It makes it doubly hard because I spend my summers putting my fresh local vegetables and fruits in jars so I have them for the winter. Depending on the year, we can put up between 400-800 jars. We try to have a good supply of around 1,000 jars by the end of summer between one house and the other.

The fresh strawberries of late May and early June are quickly followed by the incredible sour cherries waiting to be made into a sweet-tart pie that must have been the reason that Sweet Tart candies were invented. Quickly the sweet tart sour cherries are followed by the purple-hued blueberries so badly named because really, they are more purple than blue! In between the fruits in June we have the fresh greens sparkling under homemade vinegar dressings that pair well with strawberries and spinach. Swiss chard in its multi-colored hue shines against a bowl of lentils and rice to make an incredible meal of health. It is so hard to choose one fruit or vegetable and I haven’t even left the month of June yet! How do I choose just one? Especially since my summer is planned around the growing fruits and vegetables of summer? By the end of July fresh corn is warring with fresh tomatoes as my most purchased vegetables. The plums and the peaches are also bought with constant regularity throughout the month of July and early August. And I forgot all about the raspberries!

Being a long-time canner, I spend my summers putting up food so we have our own fruits and vegetables and stocks to get us through the winter months until we can experience the joy of the fresh fruits and vegetables again the next summer. It is a progression that I march through each year as I travel to my favorite three farms to get the vegetables and fruits I need to see my family through the year. My youngest daughter would insist that summer must have fresh tomatoes and jalapeno peppers made up to be like Rotel tomatoes so she has an aluminum free version of her spicy tomato sauce all year long. My oldest daughter wants blueberry pie filling lined up in purple jars to make a pie in the winter and 75 quarts of green beans stocked up so she can feed her family the only vegetable all my grandchildren actually like together. (They do like other vegetables but the four of them only agree on green beans.) My mother would argue it is the liquors we make with fruit starting with strawberry liquor in June and finishing with the apple brandy in fall. My son-in-law must have his own sour cherry pie filling because he just grabs a jar and eats it straight out of the jar or dumps it on vanilla ice cream. And he doesn’t share so much so he gets his own jars every year or my sour cherry pie filling would vanish from my stock and not one winter cherry pie would show up on my table.

Jams march in our house from the first sign of a strawberry to the winter marmalades. Each month brings a new jam and some are done in groups of 6-7 jars and others are done in groups of 30. We make so many different strawberry jams that we tend to only put up 6-7 jars of each type: strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, strawberry-mango, strawberry-lemon marmalade, strawberry-apple and strawberry-kiwi. Why make the types of jam that you could buy in the store? We tend to go for the unique flavors that can only be made and all are low-sugar recipes that have been found from safe sources. A jam that I must make at least 30 8-ounce jars of each summer is plum. We use at least 3 different kinds of plums to get the right amount of tartness and sweetness with as little sugar as we can manage.

Trying to sum up summer in one food is impossible. Summer is a sum of fresh fruit and vegetables that we use to count the progress from May until September. But, we were asked for one food. Do I count it by the food I buy the most of? That would be the many bushels of tomatoes that march through our house and are made into salsa, Rotel tomatoes, regular diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, Cacciatore sauce, Puttanesca sauce, Tikka Masala sauce and plain tomato sauce. We do so much with tomatoes. Salsa and Rotel tomatoes alone are over 150 jars each summer! But, I cannot in all good conscience say that the food that speaks to me of summer is a tomato. I like to eat them - but they are not what I long for!

The food that screams summer to me is corn. Not even talking about the canning season - corn on the cob is only brilliant in the summer. We roast it and in the summer the sweetness is so incredible that most of us do not even touch butter or salt - just the ear of corn. But, I do preserve items made from corn - they are so incredible that we live on them for the next 9 months! I roast the corn in the husk in the oven at 400 F so it comes out so delicious that we have to grab an ear to get us ready to can, freeze or dehydrate.

I buy my corn in baker's dozens of 10 - 12 dozen. I roast the ears, cut the kernels off the husk and freeze it in 2 cup baggies before vacuum sealing 3 baggies into a gallon bag. I also dehydrate the corn so that we have it to add to instant soups in a jar that just require water. The frozen corn gets stolen from my freezer by my daughter, my neighbors, friends and my sister’s family. The minimum of 2 cup baggies that I freeze each summer is 72. Then there are all the canned goods I make….corn and cherry tomato salsa, zesty corn relish, canned corn and most importantly 100 jars (pints mostly but at least 24 quarts) of corn cob stock. The recipe is a stock recipe that is pressure canned after you use 24 corn husks, onions, peppers, carrots, celery, garlic, peppercorns and kombu to make a clear stock that is so flavorful that rice cooked in it is summer sweet and delicious without a sign of butter or salt. It makes an incredible stock to start soups or cook lentils and rice. I freeze most of our corn but, I do pressure-can around 12-20 pints of corn each year that I use to make a corn cream base for soup. We are a dairy-free household and so our cream based soups come from plants and canned summer corn put in the blender makes an incredible cream base for a number of chowders all year long.

We can’t live without our tomato sauces and salsas or our jams and preserves, but what screams summer is the fresh corn on a cob that is what we consume from mid-July through August. But, because I’m a canner - we have summer all year long lined up in jars and ready to be used at any time.