October 07, 2007 - 1:05 AM.

Micro-preservation

With my new budget madness, I am even more crazy to not waste food than I was before. We get this giant bin of organic produce every 2 weeks; even though I seem to get the refer-a-friend credit every time, it's still $30 worth of produce that is so precious and organic that I cannot abide for even a mouthful to go into the compost bucket.

So today, when it became obvious that we are doing just fine eating up the spinach and apples and Asian pears and radishes and cantaloupe and fennel, but are lagging a bit in other areas, I did a little feast of micro-preservation.

Two ears of sweet corn would soon enough turn from sugar to starch, so I sliced the kernels off the cobs, blanched them for 1 minute, and put in the freezer (in a container that already held the kernels of one previous ear).

One small bunch of mustard greens and half a bunch of chard: chop all leaves, wash, cook down a bit in a saucepan in just the wash-water, put resulting 3/4 cup of greens mess in the "Greens for Gumbo" freezer container. (This container already has chard, collards, and kale in it. When it reaches 3 cups or so, I make gumbo). Also chop and blanch chard stems, add resultant 1/4 cup of cheery red stuff to freezer container labeled "Misc. Veg for Spaghetti Sauce." (To puree into spagh. sauce -- includes green beans, some greens, various squashes, zucchini, carrots, leftover mirepoix. Can also be used, unpureed, in chili or minestrone.)

5 small beets: boil until tender, peel, slice, add slices to pint jar of pickled beets I keep adding to. Jar overflows; move beety loot to quart jar. Apparently I will not eat beets any other way than pickled, but I will eat those in enough excess to give myself a "minerals" headache. Delicious!

A pound of Concord grapes so tart and seedy as to be inedible out of hand: tiny batch of grape jelly! I have made dozens of batches of various jams and fruit butters, but preserving grapes is new to me. So I read several recipes and took out a trusty box of "No Sugar Needed" pectin, and was very careful. Juiced grapes by heating quickly w/a tiny bit of water in the pan, mashing about, then pressing the mess through a sieve. (I did not bother with the 2-day cheesecloth-bag drip -- I want rough jelly NOW, not a big fruitfly magnet and the promise of clear unclouded product!) This measured about 2 1/2 cups of juice, a little over half a batch. Boiled it up with the pectin, added a scant 1/2 cup of sugar (it was TART), poured it into an old Prego jar, where it sealed but did not set up. And did not set up. But at last, 4 hours later, we have set!

I can not WAIT to spread that light pinky-purple jellyjam on something. It just smells heavenly! For decades I have scoffed at the scent of purple-colored candies, thinking they smelled only perfumey and not like food at all -- after all, I was raised on Thompson white seedless and Red Flame grapes, and they don't smell like candies at all. But these Concords -- WOW. They smell EXACTLY like purple candies. So it is a nod to nature after all!

So corn, greens, beet pickles, and grape jellyjam. Instead of waste, I am holding on to plenty for my family. And with a windstorm raging around the house, that feels really secure. (Got new gutters put on the house this morning too. Talk about feeling secure!)

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