This year, I could be just as good

It had been my intention to post this at the beginning of the month (or even the end of last month), but life has conspired to slow me down over the past few weeks. At any rate, better late than never, right? Here is a look back at the past year in food.

Spring

Spring started out slowly, with our chickens' first (tiny) eggs and squirreled away treats from the freezer. The promise of good things to come became a bit more tangible as we started tomatoes and eggplants in the shop and planted some greens down in the garden.

Our first official tastes of the season were baby salad greens from the garden, eggs, and some treats from the newly re-opened Farmer's Market. It reminded us again how exciting it is to be eating fresh produce, after a winter of preserved food (which, while delicious, gets a bit old toward the end of the season).

Then, the garden really got started. We were quickly dealing with more greens than we could eat in salads alone and became a bit more creative in our usage. Our legumes also got going, offering delicious peas and fava beans. We dug up a few new potatoes too - is there anything better?

arugula pesto

Tres also offered a thorough bread making

tutorial on the blog last spring

We wound up the season with my favorite offerings of spring: fresh fruit! After eating as much as we could, we did our first preserving of the year.

strawberry balsamic jam

amaretto cherries

Summer

ingredients for summer borscht - delicious!

Tres harvests arugula seeds

tomato tasting

Summer is, not surprisingly, when things really got going around here. 

time to make some dishes for the freezer

We ate almost exclusively from the garden all summer (other than the few staples we can't/don't grow) and still couldn't even come close to eating everything we grew. That's when we went into preserving mode. As my due date loomed closer, I started making and freezing future dinners. With our overabundance of tomatoes, squash, and eggplant, this was not a difficult task. In addition to the dinners, I froze 8 loaves of cucuzzi bread, several batches of eggplant,  15 pounds of blueberries (picked at a nearby farm), and even some eggs.

ingredients for cucuzzi ragu

we live in a great place to dry tomatoes

Did I mention how prolific the eggplants were?

With as many as we ate, I was a little worried
that the baby would come out purple.

Luckily for us, the peach season cooperated with our busy summer and Elbertas came on just as we had the opportunity to pick and preserve them. We put up 14 quarts in syrup and made the rest into peach butter, which has quickly become one of my favorite preserves. We canned tomatoes throughout the summer, as soon as enough were ripe at a go, but finished up the season by doing a final large batch. While it is time consuming, it always feels a bit festive to get out all of the big equipment (propane burner, straining basket, etc.) and make a day of it. We'll have to work hard to run out of tomatoes this winter.

peach butter

time to can the tomatoes

Autumn

By the time autumn came around I was slowing down but, thankfully, so was the garden. We didn't have a lot of luck with squash/pumpkins this year, but harvested the 5 Long Island Cheese that made it and I roasted and pureed them. Most of the puree went into the freezer, but I used one pumpkin's worth to kick off the season and baked pumpkin muffins with cream cheese frosting (for which, after reading about them on the blog, my poor mother unsuccessfully searched high and low just a few days later - never underestimate a very pregnant lady's ability to eat delicious sweet things).

With trips to the Farmer's Market and the nearby orchard, we wrapped up our preserving/storing for the year. We turned about 80 pounds of apples into sauce and kept a few to eat/bake with later and got a good start on our winter's garlic supply. By the end of October, our pantry looked about ready.

our pantry, full and ready for winter

Winter

Obviously winter hasn't been going on for long yet (although it might feel that way), but we've certainly been embracing the change in season; in fact, we might have started a bit early. First up was another batch of gløgg syrup. There's nothing like a nice, warm mug of spiced wine when it starts to get chilly.

Tres harvested all of the potatoes and carrots from the garden and a farmer friend was kind enough to gift us his (deemed by him) too small beets, as something down in the garden ate all of ours before they could grow. Tres then stored all of our roots conveniently down in the shop and they seem to be holding up even better than last year's. This year, he filled the barrel with sand  and covered the beets and carrots with slightly damp burlap. The potatoes are in slightly damp burlap sacks on the floor, covered with a tarp to prevent sprouting. I've already waxed rhapsodic about soup, so I won't go on much, other than to say that we've had a lot of it already this year and will have a lot more before the season is over. I've been trying my hand at some new recipes, in addition to the tried and true, as my sister-in-law gave me a wonderful cookbook entirely of soups for my birthday.

It's been a busy and delicious year and I'm very much looking forward to the new food experiences that 2012 will bring. Tres is already excitedly planning next year's garden and I'm thinking about additional items for preserves/freezing (more berries and jam!). We're both excited at the prospect of all the new things to which we'll get to introduce Silas, as he starts eating solid food this year.