Cooking From the Larder Part I

Cooking From The Larder

Part I

Cooking From The Larder Dec. 2005

Part I

I've always tried to use what I have at hand to make our meals. In fact I've taken great pride in developing that skill, as well as putting foods by while they're in abundance, for use later in the year. Over the years, I've been able to can, freeze, dry or otherwise preserve some very strange things and thus, have been able to fix some very wonderful, yet not very reproducible recipes. I'm going to chronicle a few of these food adventures and recipes in hopes that you might respond with some of your more unusual and mostly irreproducible recipes. I think that in doing so, we may see that it's the method and the creativity that counts in the fun of it. But the first installment is not a recipe but just the flavor of my larder this year as well as years past.

This summer I experimented with E boxes on the deck, planting three eggplants, four tomatoes and six pepper of various temperatures. These plants were a roaring success, producing two to three times as much as the raised vegetable beds in the orchard. Almost too hot to eat much this summer, I had to do something with the bounty coming on fast. So I sautéed peppers with onions and basil, and froze those in half cup portions. I skinned and froze the whole tomatoes in quart packages. Eggplant strips were sautéed with tomatoes until thick and packed in little containers for use as tapanade later. Being too lazy to get the big food dryer out of the barn this year, oven drying the Italian tomatoes a couple of quarts at a time, freezing them on the cookie sheet and popping them into a freezer bag and into the chest freezer was the way to go. There was way too much cabbage, so I combined some of the shredded stuff with carrots, and hot peppers, made the sweet/sour dressing and put by 12 containers of freezer slaw. Ten gallons of kraut are also working in the crock in the basement.

There were oodles of ears of corn leftover from one of the picnics, so after cutting it off the cob, I sautéed that with onions and more of those peppers (red and green and hot ones too) and packed those away into the freezer .(Yes, I've got two big freezers going as well as the two fridge freezers. ) The tons of basil were made into pesto and put in quart freezer bags (only about a cup in each bag) pressed flat so that when frozen, it's thin enough to break off a piece. There's also a big quart jar of basil leaves layered with salt and olive oil, in the back of the fridge, keeping company with another jar of jalapenos that were sautéed with onions and plenty of olive oil.

So let's see---in the pole barn freezer, there's precooked and shredded chicken breasts in small packs, homemade Italian sausage I made in October, two small containers of smaltz, frozen pineapple chunks from when the supermarket really got rid of all those pineapples they didn't sell, melon juice from a bushel of over ripe melons ready for melon sorbet, unsugared applesauce and bags of apple slices from the three bushels of the bumper crop on the old apple tree in the orchard. (I keep thinking she's going to die, and she keeps producing every year, scabs on the bark and all). There are slices of mango and little bags of beet greens, Swiss chard, kale--just enough to add to an omelet. Blueberries, black cherries, and blackberries, strawberries both chopped and sugared and some frozen whole and separated, strawberry and bumble berry jams, damson plum halves, several quarts of frozen "oak stump" mushrooms from out behind the pole barn, a few venison steaks , a couple of squirrels, already cooked and packaged ground beef with onions and peppers. Plenty of salmon, and steel heads from the creek , as well as smelt are crowded into the freezer bin at the bottom of the freezer.

I'm not done putting by things yet. A couple more heads of cabbage and some ground beef and pork will make stuffed cabbage. My idea is to make the filling and divide it into 3 different parts, seasoning each one with spices from the different ethnic groups that make stuffed cabbages. I think I'll do Polish, Hungarian and Greek--I haven't decided. I've got to use up these darn cabbages. There's still 5 more of those heads to go! I've got a few more squash to eat, that are out there in the pole barn, where it's not yet freezing temperature. I did cook a bushel of the butternuts and froze those up as well as the couple of leftover pumpkins.

On one rack of shelves in the pole barn are six huge tins of grain berries of various kinds ready for being ground into flour. I treated myself to a new flour grinder this year after deciding to retire the stone mill I've had since 1968. That was after I had a little talk to myself about not even considering getting that hand grinder. What a hoot, thinking to save energy and get exercise at my age! You only get those labor intensive contraptions when you have kids around that can man the darn thing.

And spices--hah, I don't know if there's one I don't have. On the downstairs kitchen's shelves and in the drawers are jars and jars of spices, herbs and homemade tea concoctions, dried elderberries from the swamp, dried mushrooms, juniper berries, rose hips, coriander seeds, cardamon pods and whatever else I might think I need. (and probably don't need too) Oh, and I do have a few homemade vinegars-- habaneras pepper, garlic, peach, and chive, as well as homemade cordials--quince, cherry, peach, orange, kummel, coffee, plum, cranberry, red currant, and a couple of tins on the shelf, one of which is filled with quince paste squares, and one with candied orange peel strips.

Back in the 70's and 80's while raising the kids on a small farm, there was a Jersey cow, goats, chickens, a couple of pigs and geese every year, (always with appropriate names like "Christmas", "Easter", "Yum-yum", or "Delicious") as well as currant and gooseberry bushes, pear, apple, peach and cherry trees, and wild blackberry and blueberries to deal with. There was always a country ham curing in barn fridge, which was carefully slivered from throughout winter.

Imagine waking up on Saturdays with the burning question of "What can I do to get rid of two more pounds butter, a dozen eggs and a gallon of cream?" When you have a freshened Jersey cow, you can even indulge yourself by making beesting pudding, a recipe I found in an old English farm cookbook. With my compulsion to use everything, I burned the midnight oil many times, after teaching all day, in order to "put by" everything. One especially abundant tomato year, after having canned up 200 quarts of various tomato recipes, I decided to dry the rest of the Italian tomatoes. Do you know that if you dry them bone dry and process them into a powder in the blender, you can get 3 bushel of tomatoes into one 5# cottage cheese carton?

You might be wondering what's up with me and canning. Well, I'm mostly canned out after years of putting up everything that came out of the garden. Oh, the compulsion of having to make sure not a tomato goes unused, a pear not canned, or chutneyed, a bean or cucumber not pickled. It was unbearable. I finally snapped! I gave away all of the canning jars. (Okay, not all of them. I saved the antique ones and 4 or 5 dozen pint jars, and the half gallon ones, and the jelly jars) Yes, I know it's more expensive to run the freezers, but I've justified that by saying it's far more nutritious and I'm saving on doctor bills. And I have to say it tastes so much more fresh. So the only things left on the canning shelves are a few quarts of dilly green beans, pickled Brussel sprouts, and pickled beets.

Still out in the garden is a little bit of two kinds of kale, which, though frozen, would still be good in soup next week. I think I'll get my boots on, go over the snow bank and bring that in tomorrow.