Gardening – Preserving the bounty

At this time of year, the garden is a veritable cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. With only two of us at home now the kids have departed, there is more than we can ever hope to consume fresh. So, our home turns into a food processing factory. There are three main techniques we use to preserve the season’s bounty – freezing, drying and bottling. The choice of which technique to use depends on the type of crop, the time we have spare and the intended end-use.

The bulk of the tomato crop is chopped into quarters and frozen, and this year Angela has hit on the idea of adding basil leaves to the top of each bag. We have a plentiful supply of basil, but being cold tender, is not readily available in winter when we are using the frozen tomatoes for delicious tomato soup, so having the frozen basil already in each bag to add was a brainwave!

Some of the tomatoes will be sliced and dried in the dehydrator, then stored in olive oil, the perfect solution for homemade pizzas. If I get the time, I may make some of my extra-salty tomato paste which adds a real tangy, salty, umami bite to pizza sauce. It’s a laborious process using pulped roma tomatoes that are slowly boiled down, then sieved, spread out onto baking trays and slowly dried in the oven, while regularly re-spreading until the right consistency is achieved.

Pasta sauce (and ratatouille) is best made during the summer, when there is also a plentiful supply of other vegetables such as zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, capsicums, garlic and herbs such as thyme, basil, rosemary, parsley, oregano and marjoram. The sauce can be stored in the freezer, but I if I have time I prefer to bottle it, partly as this saves on freezer space, but also because it just looks so good on the pantry shelf.

There are many ways of using versatile zucchini (otherwise known as courgettes), but our favourite is the zucchini fritters that Angela makes. Grate four to six large zucchini and an equal amount of potato, squeeze out in a tea-towel to remove the excess juice, add chopped chives or spring onions, a couple of tablespoons of self-raising flour, salt and pepper and two eggs, then take a tablespoon of the mix, drop it into a layer of hot oil in a frying pan, flatten it out and fry on both sides till golden brown, delish! Even vegetable averse kids will love them.

Our preferred method of dealing with an abundance of sweetcorn is to boil the cobs, cool them quickly in an ice water bath, pat them dry then slice off the kernels into bags for freezing. Easy to use in soups, fritters and in a multitude of winter warming recipes. Green beans are also treated much the same way, but they are sliced fresh, then steamed for just a few minutes rather than boiled, before being placed in the ice bath.

In addition to these crops, we’ll be bottling plums, apples, feijoas, freezing bananas, slices of lemon, pumpkin soup, pesto, ginger, turmeric, blueberries and drying a range of herbs. By the end of the season, our freezer and pantry will be full of healthy fruits and vegetables, all ready for a long winter, or as a handy backup in these times of lockdowns and supply chain issues.